Learning arabic to understand the quran

I have been attempting to learn arabic to understand the quran when I hear it. I started of with the website understanding the quran the easy way where you memorize 80% of the words the occur in the quran some 40000 times.

Then I moved to another site madinaharabic.com where you would start by learning demonstrative pronouns 'this is' what is this etc etc.

I found that it is a lot of memorization..

I wanted to know if someone has started learning arabic from scratch, how long did it take to be able to become adequate at understanding it or even fluent...

Also, I want to know if anyone has any other methods than the ones shown above of how to understand the quran...

I think that perhaps this may not be the right time for me to learn the quran... and that I should wait till I am perhaps a bit older and have career or so and at some point take 6 months or so out of my life and enroll in quran learning class and do it full time to learn it...I guess the main problem is that who knows if I will be alive to witness such a day.. none the less, it is not compulsory to be able to understand the quran ...correct? As long as I can read it and read the interpretation...

However, I still strongly want to learn it ..