I tried that back when I was learning Clojure. I ended up ditching Emacs to use a more immediately familiar environment (Eclipse w/CounterClockwise plugin).

I wouldn't say never learn two things at once, but I'd be aware of the extra mental load you're creating for yourself. It definitely makes things more challenging.

I agree with this completely. I use emacs for clojure and I really like it, but learning a new language and a new editor at the same time is going to make things harder. There are clojure plugins for most popular editors at this point. Learn with an editor/IDE you understand and like and then switch editors later on if you want to.

Point taken, thanks. I'm familiar with Eclipse for Android, but considering I'll likely be abandoning it for that purpose given the new platform, I'm hoping to pick up emacs not just for Clojure but for a general non-nano CLI text editing default.

For clojure, I'd actually recommend using light table. From my experience with the latest dev versions, the learning curve isn't hard at all and immediately having your code evaluated is pretty powerful and intuitive. [I started learning clojure recently as well]