Maxx,
First off, welcome to the forum
Before you learn Thermal flight, you'll want to learn basic flight. Without the ability to direct the plane to where you want it, and recover from bad attitudes and mistakes, hunting the illusive invisible beast will be overcome with just trying to keep the plane from crashing.
For this goal, the UMX radian is ideal. It's gentle in control, the stabilizer is friendly and if something goes wrong, cut the throttle and she'll glide in a bit slower, giving you more time to respond. If you don't respond quickly enough, it's fairly light, so durable in crashes -- fly over grass if you can, and she'll take a fair amount of abuse.
As for the next step -- hunting thermals . . . she will thermal, and has the wingloading to do it well . . .
. . . but . . .
First off, the stabilizer will hide quite a bit of thermal activity -- you'll see the plane physically pop-up or down as it moves through lift/sink, but the stabilizer will resist lifting wings or lifting/dropping the tail as it bumps through. By the same token, the short wings simply don't search as wide of a swath of air as their larger 1.5-3m brethren, so it's not a great hunter. Great, plane, sure, but in this respect, bigger simply flies better.
So first trainer? She's just fine. Secondary trainer to learn thermal hunting? Once you're this far along, you're probably better off with the full sized Radian . . . or one of many other larger friendly sailplanes.