Newbie here, Just getting my feet wet here, Hoping to better understand these terms and their consequences.
Hoping to start with lite coin or bch, Any thoughts on these hard fork news? Thanks!
Your title does not reflect the rest of your post... To answer your title: the BCH fork has already happend quite a while ago... The situation you see today is what happened after the fork: nothing really. The forked chain exists, it's being traded, people that had controll over unspent outputs before the fork now have unspent outputs on both chains... That's about it
To answer the second part of your question (the question asked in your post): i personally feel there's a big difference between LTC and BCH. Ltc was the first clone, they changed the POW algo (and some other parameters) and re-built their blockchain right from the genesis block.
BCH is a forked off chain, they kept the historical blockchain database from BTC and only at a certain blockheight they decided to fork. Personally, i'm a bigger fan of LTC, but that's just my personal opinion. It's up to you to decide which (alt)coin you'd like to invest in, i don't think any of the two coins you asked about will dissapear any time soon (once again: my personal gut feeling)