This is excellent advice. I may make another go at it.

Like you, I've tried before. After a day or two of trying to remember alt-command-blah-blah-blah every time I wanted to do something simple, I gave up. Then I started mousing around which totally defeated the purpose of trying to pick it up.

I also found (at least 7-8 years ago) the windows Emacs to be terribly slow. Hopefully that's not still true. That also effectively kills the learning experience after a while.