My first App - ionic, typescript and plugins confusion

Hi,

I need to develop an App but it is an activity that happens only few times
I was looking at PhoneGap since it is suppose to work with Javascript, CSS, HTML

I saw ionic framework and I think is pretty interesting but looking the video of crash course 2 on youtube now seems that javascript is written in typescript ( that i don’t use ) , I’m more comfortable with jQuery since i already use for web projects

not sure if I have to use typescript or if i can use standard javascript inside .ts files

can I also use jQuery?

where and how can i add custom "modules"
for example i need to add this plugin inside my app, where should i place it?