Unfortunalty, crashmatusow is correct, there's no shortcut to learning the ship types. Pirates and militas use TEC ships (okay, pirates don't, but they look pretty similar, so you can learn from that.) Afterwards, all you can do is learn your ships fully in one race, and then play several games as the other races, getting all of the ships and research, so that when you start playing huge games against multitple AIs or mulitplayer, you can quickly decide if a hostile fleet of 30 Diciples against your fleet of 20 Enforcers needs extra backup (hopefuly not ) or if a fleet of 15 Ogrov cruisers are a threat to your undefended Argovev star base (hell yes)

Just play, learn, and expect to take a few beatings

How do you mean? A mod that alters the tooltip to say what the ship does? If that's the case, I doubt there's one around, it'd be more effort than it's worth to make one, simply because it's not that hard to learn the different ships.