Then spend a week doing as much as possible from within vim. You will start to get the basic hang of it. Then as you want to do other things, assume vim can do them for you and try and figure out how. #vim on freenode is good for this, although much of the help comes in the form of :he X. This means, read the documentation, the topic keyword is x. You literally type that into the editor command line :) The vim documentation is very good -- in fact just reading a few things extra every time you use vim is a good idea.

A final note: I have been using vim for my main editor for years now, and still learn new stuff all the time. Playing with new scripts, finding new bits of workflow, and getting really fast at it all take time. This is natural. I try and pick a couple new things a week an use them. Sometimes I will then forget about them for weeks, months or years because I think they are useless, but "rediscover" them only to use them all the time. Its actually quite fun.

That's the best tip of all. Ask yourself this question: "Can I walk through all the vimtutor examples without thinking too much?" If you can't, there is probably stuff in there you should learn. Make sure you know what an operator is, and what insert mode does. Listen to vimtutor when it tells you to learn by doing, not by trying to memorize everything in the tutorial. I learned by doing vimtutor over and over again until I could complete it without referring to help. If I forgot commands, I'd start over completely at the beginning and progress as far as I could until I had to start over to review. Do this a dozen times or so and soon you'll have basic facility.

Also, use vim for everything, not just code. Use it for email, writing projects, file management, and explore what else it can do for you.

Thats how I started.

Following this I also made it a point to read at least a little vim documentation (:h) every day. Its very detailed and helpful.

There is also the Vim book[1] by Steve Oualline which is also available free as a PDF.

Reading Vim tips[2] was also something that I found useful.

[1] http://www.vim.org/docs.php

[2] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Best_Vim_Tips

in addition, this is a pretty good guide. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/l-dw-linuxvi-i.html