I did, and Ruby was quick and easy. I wrote a bunch of programs and felt comfortable enough that I could understand stuff if I looked at it. But Rails seems like a whole other animal. And your right, this is the difference between languages and frameworks. But, without Rails I'm not sure how to get to a web app with Ruby. With PHP I was writing web apps before I really understood the language.
I don't mean to be saying that I'm doing it right, or that mine was a good way to learn programming. Just mean to be giving a data point about the relative approachability of PHP and RoR for actually making stuff as a beginner.
Start with Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/) instead. I had worked with PHP for a little while, and I decided to try out ROR. I could not understand it at all. I did some plain ruby for a while.
Eventually, I heard about Sinatra, and decided to try it out. It's a great way to learn about web apps. You'll learn the HTTP verbs if you haven't already, and you'll understand the routing process.
When you jump into Rails, you'll already understand Controllers and Routers, since Sinatra is basically the router and controller of Rails combined. You'll probably learn about views too.
Doing otherwise is like trying to learn PHP by looking at the Drupal codebase.