"So, you start off with three Tier 1 tanks in your garage, one from each country currently represented in the game. I say “tanks”, that’s stretching it a bit; they’re more the inter-war experiments that generally pottered up and down in front of generals before slowly toppling over or sliding into a ditch while the generals tutted about them never replacing horses and swigged gin. Imagine a Morris Minor wrapped in aluminum foil for protection with a bloke leaning out of the window with a spud gun, that would be the sort of terrifying death machine you run away from in a Tier 1 tank."
An entertaining guide for beginners
http://www.kiasa.org/2011/05/04/starting-out-in-world-of-tanks/