Ask HN: How to Get into Statistics?

My ultimate goal is to become proficient in statistical learning (you may know it as the boring part of ML). I’ve read a lot of good things about Introduction to statistical learning, but that book assumes a level of statistical knowledge that I do not possess - specifically, it throws around word like t-distribution, degree of freedom, p-value etc.

I’d like to understand those basics before I get deeper into the book. Is there some other preliminary textbook which would introduce me to those concepts?