That wasn't true for me. Working through vimtutor for vim and the `C-h t' tutorial for emacs, followed by some spaced repetition over the next few weeks, got the basic motion commands of both editors fully ingrained in my muscle memory. It took longer for my fingers to internalize using operators on text objects in vim, but you can definitely master the basics in a few days. Even though I use vim as my daily editor and haven't really used emacs (at least with emacs-style keybindings) since working through the interactive tutorial years ago, it only takes me a few seconds to get comfortable navigating an emacs buffer without having to think.
Granted, emacs keybindings deliberately don't constitute a language (the whole point of emacs is to remap them for different functionality in different contexts), but I don't think it took me much longer to "become an expert" at vim's language of editing.
Granted, emacs keybindings deliberately don't constitute a language (the whole point of emacs is to remap them for different functionality in different contexts), but I don't think it took me much longer to "become an expert" at vim's language of editing.