4Game

10k battles, playing on and off for 9 years now, terrible tomato

Hello! As stated in the title, I've been playing this game on and off since 2013, and after almost 10k battles I'm still struggling to understand ANY tank, the map, positioning, etc.
This last game really made me pissed off at myself for being so bad and I wanted to post the replay here to ask for some advice because I'm not having fun dying every game while only getting 2-3 shots off at most…

http://wotreplays.eu/site/6118322#kharkov-octa1115-object_257

My questions are:

Should I have been somewhere else? If yes, where? and how can I tell where I should be? I just go to the spots that I relatively know are for my type of tank, in this case I chose the city because I was playing OBJ 257.
How can I aim at weakspots if they don't matter because of the distance? My shots seem to be way off compared to that IS-2-II, he's being very consistent with aiming at my cupola somehow.
How do I actually learn from watching others play? I watch Skill4ltu pretty often but only for the entertainment value… I don't understand how to apply what I see on his stream because the game is so complex.