I'm always looking stuff up, because the man pages are good enough ... that I don't go out of my way to memorize stuff

As that may be, but in order to look stuff up; you need to know what to look up.

At the beginning with any new language, the steepest part of the learning curve is knowing where to look and what to look up.

And it has knock on effects for your whole approach to both writing the code; and structuring the application; even how you think about the problem.

The best evidence for this are the flavours (C-ish; OO-ish, Fortran-ish etc.) of code you see in SoPWs from newbies to Perl. You can often make a good guess at not only how much programming experience they have; but which, if any, previous language they have experience of, just from the way they approach the problem and the style of code that produces.

Making effective use of Perl means becoming one with its operator rich environment and its built-in data-types; and making your code play to its strengths.

The worst code you'll see is that modeled after JS or Java or C++; which tries to write everything-is-an-object code in a language that has better solutions for many problems.