I didn't finish the course as I moved to Elixir, although I liked Clojure very much. Elixir is also functional, much better for newcomers, lots of support, people, documentation, examples, books, courses, growing very fast... And one doesn't need to wait several seconds to start the virtual machine.
When I was first getting into lisp/functional programming a few years ago I would find that after writing a 6-8+ line solution on some of the tougher problems, the top users would have a way of doing it in 1-2 either due to a standard library function I didn't know about or they just took a better approach overall.
But I went through a complete journey of reading ANSI Common Lisp, The Little Schemer, The Seasoned Schemer, On Lisp and various other scheme material on the internet.
So syntax and other Lisp related stuff wasn't the problem. The Joy of Clojure book showed the Clojure way of doing things really well.
If you have to start on absolute basics of Lisp, I'd recommend watching the SICP lectures and reading PG's ANSI Common Lisp book.
https://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Practical-Lisp-Wo...
A lot of tips and insight of how to do and not to do things in Clojure without too much hype. "Practical Lisp for the Java World" - the title does not lie :).