As for where to go, if you go to your quests panel in the journal and double-click on one, you'll select that as your active quest and will have a marker added on the map (and minimap) to show you where to go. A few quests span multiple chapters and can't be completed until later, so if you can't figure out what to do next in a quest, you should move on to another quest. Sometimes you'll find things while finishing one quest that helps you with another, like in the case of the monster contracts—they don't give you too much information about what to do or where to go at first, but the pursuit of other goals takes you all around and you'll likely have to kill a number of monsters in the course of completing other quests, which, in turn, unlocks the knowledge of those monsters required to finish the contract quests.
The name thing becomes much easier the more you play the game, though I found it daunting at first, too, for what that's worth. Everything gets more and more explanation (and becomes more familiar) as the story progresses, so you don't have to understand everything at first. As such, it doesn't require study so much as a certain amount of patience. This is very much a story-driven game though, so if you don't have enough time to follow a story with several different moving parts, this probably isn't the game you should be playing.
