You can use git as a frontend to an svn repo but I haven't heard about doing it the other way. Because git is a superset of svn it may be possible but a quick search turns up nothing. Setting up cygwin is a snap. I am still a git noob. After an hour or two of reading you'll be able to use the git basics and after a few hours more reading you'll be able to use the basics and actually know wtf is going on underneath.