Correction, you must install paredit (and spend half a day familiarizing yourself with how it works). It'll make your learning experience 10x easier.

As for Emacs vs Vim, I also use Vim for Clojure development. There's definitely a bias toward Emacs in the community, but that doesn't mean that you have to go with Emacs. In fact, there are now useful plugins/packages to work with Clojure in Vim, Sublime, IntelliJ, Eclipse, as well as Emacs. There's even two editors written in Clojure itself: Clooj (https://github.com/arthuredelstein/clooj) and the afore-linked LightTable.