I would say, if you know what you want to do, and roughly how to do things, then learning the syntax to do it is easy.

If you're trying to learn algorithms and programming at the same time, doing it in any language is going to be hard.

I was introduced to Perl at work, and was given 2 weeks to get up to speed on it. Now, I was already a developer and knew algorithms and a couple flavours of C and VB, so all I needed to learn was the actual language.

I spent the first day collecting files and installing, and browsing around and found http://perldoc.perl.org/ and perlmonks.

The second day, I aimed high and grabbed some sample code which opened a port and echoed back what you sent it. Over the week, I then turned that into a little market/exchange server that would let people log in and trade virtual resources for a play-by-committee game.

At the time, I didn't get dereferencing syntax, so the code was quite verbose with each deref step on its own line and no arrows in sight (just @$ref and friends to start with). My code also had a strong C accent, but I've gotten a lot better since then ;).