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.