Like your friend, I came at Perl with several other languages (and years of experience) in my bag. What worked for me was to find real problems that I wanted to solve, then study how someone else solved them in Perl. At the time, studying merlyn's columns in the now-defunct Web Techniques magazine. Fortunately, his columns are all on-line here. I recommend keeping a copy of the Camel within reach during study.

And along the way, I ingested several Perl books, including many mentioned above, and merlyn's Effective Perl Programming, which helped me through the Intermediate transition.

That, and practice, practice, practice.