From whatbive heard, Microsoft mvc is actually pretty decent and actually makes sense to certain degree. A grown up language like java would actually probably make even more sense.
Although I love php and find it easy to use, I can see your point!
Cakephp didn’t make any sense to me. Symfony2 os wonderful hit I don’t have a year to learn it. Kohana looks good but something
Just told me stay away. People say code igniter is the easiest to learn and probably is a great place to start – but I don’t want to see php4 code anymore! Fuelphp looks good but is too young for my standard and there lots lots more! Ahhh zend … I don’t want to go back to college 
I came to Yii understanding I’m going to have to invest time and to live with a big memory footprint. But, it seems to offer a nice balance between not being as crazy difficult as symfony2 yet still almost as powerful.
I picked up php pretty fast coming from the perl world. I picked up php5 / mvc pretty fast too after not programming for several years.
Why don’t you install Yii and tinker with blog demo?
It actually does something and has most pieces already there. It also provides enough room to add in extra pieces and get a taste of what is going on.
I have some php experience so I’ve been tinkering with a few different Yii projects to get my feet wet and get a chance to see how people have been using Yii for real.
Most programming books suck! They hand feed you code and then just go on to explain what they did rather than why they choose to do such and such. Then there’s the other side that goes over board on API and fictions but never really tie it together for you.
I like to jump in and tweak and break code. I learn by being in the trenches. Way more difficult and time consuming and I end up learning things in the wrong order or skip important things like how to build proper arrays and such but it’s for me and I want to study the way I want.
I would suggest downloading different projects from different frameworks, pop open the hood, kick the tires and see what speaks to you.
Why do you want to learn php?
You always have python/django, ruby/rails, java/grails, and js/node 
Find a language to love and you’ll be amazed at how easy hard study is 