How much time it takes to learn ABAP?

Few days ago I was responding to exactly the same question of one guy: “How much time it takes to learn ABAP?“. The answer depends on many attributes.

I was mentoring one colleague, who was total fresher in ABAP, but very smart and in 1 and half month, she was able to work on building BW application in SAP independently. On the other hand, I got another colleague to teach ABAP and even after 6 months he was not as good as she was in one and half month. So really depends on many aspects:

if you are really motivated to learn it
if you already know programming techniques
how good is your logical and analytical thinking
how quickly you are able to understand things
…

I will provide my insights from what source of information works the worst, and what works the best to learn ABAP effectively from my perspective. So starting from worst:

if you learn from reading BOOKS, BLOG ARTICLES, ..: depends on what source of information you get, but in general, it is the longest way how to learn ABAP.
if you watch practical YouTube VIDEOS: it is much better, because you see actual programming on the fly, but still, you will spend too much time watching such videos and you can end up being messed up, just because, many times YT channels do not have their instructional videos structured in the way, to lead new ABAP learners from the beginning to some reasonable end
if you take regular ONLINE TRAINING (e.g. Udemy, Coursera, …): this is much better, because you get
1. structured video tutorials (+ many times with additional learning materials)
2. most often you get practical skills, because you are motivated in such training to code (e.g. you should implement small project).
3. ideally, access to instructor, who can answer to your questions
if you take ONLINE TRAINING WITH MENTORING (e.g. here Learn Practical Programming Skills in SAP/ABAP for Beginners for FREE): this is very efficient way, because in addition to regular training you get:
1. ideally, you get access to community of students, where you can ask your questions people in your learning level directly
2. if you get stuck, you get direct access to ABAP expert, who can help you move forward much faster
3. you get feedback on your code from ABAP expert
if you find ABAP junior job with no experience: GO FOR IT! It is the best and fastest way how to learn ABAP. And you are paid to learn.

Finally, you will never stop learning ABAP, because it is still being developed, so you will have to learn it constantly. And even SAP system is really robust, so whenever you will want to implement software to any new module, you will have to learn quite some knowledge about processes in there as well.