In my opinion for an Afrikaans speakers it's little bit difficult to learn Dutch, then Dutch to Afrikaans. But surly a Afrikaans-speaker has a advantage to learn Dutch, because we share a lot of words.
I've been to SA for three months and lived with a Afrikaans speaking family in Capetown. My experience I could read and understand Afrikaans from the radio/tv about 90%. However to have a conversation, me in Dutch with a Afrikaans-speaker I could understand it for 60%. (Maybe they spoke with a dialect in Cape town?) We could communicate perfectly Dutch-Afrikaans if we talk slowly. But after a while we changed quickly to English.
We use the same words, but the sentences are in different word order. Also Afrikaans is more simple then Dutch. As Afrikaans is written phonetically and Dutch not. Sum different Dutch letters are pronounce the same. Words we pronunciation the same but write different. Regt = Recht, Lieg = Lieg, Kontinu = Continu, Kom = Kom, Saak = Zaak, Saam = Samen, etc, etc.
Also Afrikaans use a lot of words, that isn't used in a daily conversation with Dutch. But I know what the words means because it's exist in the Dutch vocabulary. In case of the Dutch language, we use a lot of French and sum German words.
I think for a afrikaans speaker it's easy to read Dutch, but to speak it will takes sum time. It's another language but the advantage is we share the same words.
For adult , already bilingual native speakers of english, reaching fluency in dutch is supposed to take 600 hours of class minimum. If you know afrikaans, you can do it a little bit faster because the languages are very close, especially in vocab. Afrikaans basically is how people spoke in the southwest of the netherlands a few hundred years ago, but with simplified (if not anglified...) spelling and grammar
I would imagine you'd get the gist of it within a few weeks.
Fairly quick since the languages have the same roots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Q4ZMmw0...
