Blue mage spells

[Xantavia]

To add to what Trumpy said, if you have a chocobo wand or any other event weapon with 1 damage, that is great to use for tp feed. It also won't hurt your spells too much as long as you have a decent club skill.

I also learned body slam after zoning to drop hate while the rest of the party kept fighting it the dragon. I zoned back in, saw it die, and got the spell. So just another example of learning under an unusual circumstance.

[Rwolf]

That's my bad for wording it improperly. You do need to be in range it takes to normally receive EXP but not for experience points. The target also has to be capable of giving EXP at some point. There's a few exceptions like Campaign and Reives. Not sure what else fits in there.

[Vivivivi]

My best advice for learning blue magic is to just keep playing blue mage as much as you can. Things get a lot easier once you have your AF1 because of the skill boost and increased chance to learn spells. There's of course a few "must have" spells. A few low-mp physical spells, bludgeon (spelling?) for feeding the mob tp, pollen or wild carrot will help a lot.

Even at level 99 I'm finding myself running around getting merits on blue because I know there's still a handful of spells I don't have (learned final sting last night in fact LOL). It can be frustrating at lower levels, but in my opinion it's the most fun mage job there is due to having to organically learn spells instead of buying them.