Hi Justin!
I would recommend going with a tutor for the beginning, so you can get the feel of the language. Especially true if you want to speak it. I suppose you might be able to get a reading knowledge, but you definitely need a human being to get the pronunciation.
As to how long -- I started learning Russian in high school about 50 years ago and I still have a long ways to go. I can read it really well, write with a clear foreign accent and grammatical errors, and speak fairly fluently but with a strong American accent.