The thing is, you can write Perl in a very C-like manner. (Some people like to play the sport where you write programs which will compile as both valid C and valid Perl!) Writing Perl that way will probably not take you long to pick up...

# Function to add a list of numbers together
sub sum {
    my @numbers = @_;
    my $sum = 0;
    for (my $i = 0; $i <= $#numbers; $i++) {
        $sum += $numbers[$i];
    }
    return $sum;
}
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But on the other hand, this function might look more foreign to you, but if you had experience writing Haskell or Miranda would seem perfectly obvious:

use List::Util 'reduce';
sub sum {
    my @numbers = @_;
    return reduce { $a + $b } @numbers;
}
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A seasoned Perl programmer will probably have discovered that the following knocks the socks off both of the above performance-wise...

sub sum {
    my $sum;
    $sum += $_ for @_;
    return $sum;
}
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But once you'd gained familiarity with the core libraries and with CPAN, you'd realise that List::Util (from which we borrowed the reduce keyword earlier) has a sum function available, and it runs about 40 times faster that the first example given above. :-) So you'd just borrow that...

use List::Util 'sum';
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So in answer to your question, it might take you a couple of days to start writing C-like code in Perl, but as with any mature programming language, familiarity with the important libraries, and a feel for writing elegant and efficient code take many years to develop.