Depends what you wanna learn it for. If you just want to go over and have a holiday-like thing in whatever country, you don't need to concentrate as much on spelling and grammar etc.

But you should definitely learn the alphabet and pronunciation of it all. Mostly so you don't look like a pleb when it comes to booking a campsite O_O.

My mum spent 5 years in France. That was enough time to get her fluent enough to be confused for an actual French person, by French people.