A couple of observations:
- Pick a distro (or, at least, a genealogical line) and stick to it;
- Don't try to 'learn it' – use it and learn stuff as you need it.
I started with Slackware – it was free, on a set of floppies, from a magazine about 20 years ago (gulp) – and I stumbled in the dark for a month or so then gave up. Over the next few years I dallied with them all, mainstream and niche, but never got beyond 'novelty' installations.
Then Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake arrived with a buzz, arguably the first Linux release that a layman could just install and use. In those days, Canonical did little more than shave off the loose ends of Debian and make it look pretty, but the enormous community of noobs meant that it was now possible to ask the most basic question without being told to RTFM. Within a couple of months, I was using Linux regularly and by the end of the first year it was my main OS for social, domestic and pleasure use.
A year after Ubuntu 6.06 came Debian Etch, which had benefited greatly from the influence (and code contributions) of Ubuntu. I was now in a position to know enough to ask questions on the Debian forums without being shot down in flames, but most of the Ubuntu experience was directly transferable to Debian (the benefit of the genealogical line). On top of that, the Internet was awash with support resources by now, so Google became much more useful and in those days, Google still had a Linux search portal, which helped to filter the results.
Once you get up that first step, your understanding of the big picture improves considerably. Things still need to be learnt, but there's much more building on existing stuff, so the new stuff is more incremental than revolutionary. None of it is hard – no, really! – but it takes a bit of perseverance at the beginning. There has never been an easier time to get started: there is a multitude of giants' shoulders to stand on.
