It sounds like you're used to editing files in Windows. So your hands are accustomed to standard Windows way of selecting text, cutting, copying and pasting. Emacs does not do things this way, not at all. You can google for "cua.el", a chunk of elisp that customizes Emacs to do that stuff in a much more Windows-ish way. It's definitely not identical though. There's also some elisp out there that makes Emacs scroll one line at a time, instead of ten lines or whatever stone age thing it does by default.

If you want the least pain in getting started with a lisp, I recommend PLT Scheme. Its editor, DrScheme, will seem very ordinary and familiar. That's not a win in the long run, but in the short run you can learn how to hack a lisp, Scheme in this case, without simultaneously retraining your hands and eyes to use Emacs. And learning a lisp is what you really want to do, believe me. I was in your shoes not too long ago, and this is what I did.

(And PLT Scheme is great.)