How do I delete podcasts I have listened to from latest version of iTunes?

Question

I am not able to keep up with the new versions of iTunes and IPod (now on iOS 6.0.1). It seems you have to completely re-learn things almost every month!
I download podcasts from a lot of sources, but virually never direct from iTunes (I find the search bar in iTunes almost useless and can rarely find what I want, whereas I know the home sites of the podcasts I do want, and want to manage all the downloads manually).
I listen to them and afterwards manually delete them directly on my iPod.
Before the latest version, I never used to sync my iPod and so it didn;t really matter to me what was in my iTunes library.
I now find it very difficult to manage the iPod manually (transferring things individually into iTunes and then to iPod, so yesterday I (accidentally) deleted everything in iTunes and iPod and started again. I now find that I cannot delete things from iTines and am scared that when I next sync my iPod, all the podcasts I have already listened to and deleted directly on the iPod will be re-loaded into the iPod.
Please could someone help me?
In an ideal world, without losing what I have re-loaded into the iPod I would go back to the previous version of ITunes and to the pre- latest update version of software I had on my iPod as I learnt how to do things undr those conditions!
Many thanks, and with apologies for being too old and tech illiterate to keep up with these constant changes.........
tks,
Nick

Answer 1

Have you looked at chapter 31 of Users Guide:
iPod touch User Guide iOS 6