Weapons training only starts after a student has mastered the basics of open hand combat. Whether you have a weapon or not, you still have to understand movement and stance, otherwise you just trip over your own feet and can't use the weapon.
The first weapon to learn is a stick. You get a little piece of bamboo about a foot long. The first time you hold it, you can't imagine how this thing could ever hurt someone. Then come the joint locks. You hold the stick in your fist pointing downward, stance is the same as without one. (same as a knife) The stick is used for trapping. Anything you can catch with it, you cross your other hand and grab the other end. Then squeeze and roll. Fingers, wrist, elbow, ankle/knee...the pain is excruciating.
The Asian cultures used bamboo because it grew everywhere. The larger point to understand is that the stick is a concept. Look around you right now, and there are probably some sticks. Silverware, any tool with a handle, anything in that shape will work. I've seen my trainer use the crappiest, cheapest of ink pens, the kind that come in a pack of a dozen. He could take the biggest toughest fighter we had, trap a finger with that pen, and make the guy drop from pain.
After mastering one stick, you move to two sticks. They are connected by a string and called nun-chucks. Actual use of them has very little to do with what you see in movies. It's mostly a similar trapping motion, except now you get to squeeze what you trapped between two sticks. It takes the excruciating pain of one stick to a new level. My trainer liked to say that no one ever asked him to train nun-chucks a second time.
