[wyclif]

A thousand times yes to this, and not just because it's how I learned. It puts the commands into your muscle memory. You should not be trying to memorise anything; just follow the directions and don't move on until you complete each step. Then when you're done, do it again. Do vimtutor as many times as you need to until you really don't need to think about how to manipulate text.

And yes to the ~/.vimrc advice here. You should start with an empty dotfile and build up from there. DO NOT make the mistake of starting out by installing Janus. There shouldn't be anything in your ~/.vimrc until you understand what it does, and editing that file should be done incrementally by the user instead of being a copied file. This is part of the learning process.