The best way to learn emacs is to have @kfogel patiently walk you through all your tasks and patiently lead you to the keystrokes you need. He is doing that for somebody to my immediate left and it is a marvel to hear.

Failing that, step one might be learn enough to do what you used to do in gedit. That means, open/close/save, switch buffers, search and replace, basic movement. It's probably easier than trying to remember all the key combos.