I think we needed six.
Also, when you do get a tablet/flash, lemme know.
You should probably start watching people like
on here as well; he's beginning to put up some tutorials on things like walk cycles (where i FINALLY learned about onion-skinning OTL) and they're very important to read.
Action Script or Photoshop animations you'll need to learn somewhere else though (there's books for Action Script; photoshop is freaking weird to animate with, i hate it, personally, but you might like it).
Also we'll have it as a class next year, so...yeah.
You can draw frames on paper as well, if you want to get a head start (actually, i would start trying to draw the same character/thing over an over again in different positions to get used to animating...'cause that's what it is, most of the time).