1) 10 000 + hours to learn something new to become an expert.
So, if you'll take 1 hour every day it takes ~ 3 years (1/10 of god level) to become not so bad programmer

2) PHP is widely used for filling HTML templates with your data and generate site pages (Wordpress is php driven).

3) It's not best way. Better to learn the basics of programming, then the (any) language become just a tool.

Learning the basics of programming will take you to any language. PHP is a good start I would say

Once you know the basic of programming it will take less than 100 hours to move from one language to another

1. years
2. without PHP/ASP the entire web would be static (nobody can post content, update content, delete content, without modifying HTML pages). PHP allows you to, for example, have 1 million pages on a website, without actually having 1 million .html files on your server. It creates dynamic web pages.
3. you can start by downloading XAMPP to your computer. XAMPP is apache web server and mysql server that you can code + test on your computer.

Just throwing in my 2c..

If you want to learn how to program, I wouldn't recommend PHP as a starting point.. the lack of "good" debugging options + the added complexity of not having "normal" persistence makes it a tricky language to learn core concepts (IMO, anyway). Realistally, one does not learn just PHP.. one learns PHP + SQL + JS + HTML + CSS.. Get the idea?

Java or C# are much better beginners languages IMO, and considering they are syntactically very similar to PHP, you'd be off to a good start for diving into PHP once you get to grips with programming and c derived languages.

Cheers,
Michael

There are lots of techniques to learn PHP, but the time to master that kind of programming language will took months of experience. You can visit some tutorials online about basic PHP.

In my opinion you should learn PHP as a start point.. And then you can learn bigger and more complex tools.

Assuming you know some basic HTML already, here's a 4-step method for being a good PHP programmer:

1) Start by doing small programs (for example, adding two numbers, writing some text into a file, selecting and inserting data into a database, etc). You'll get the flow.

2) Create an html page and display it. Add some PHP code to your HTML page and see what changes. Play with it a lot and try out all the things and more that you tried in Step 1, till you become confident.

3) Once you feel very confident about building websites about PHP, go ahead and try building one. (Keep in mind that a website is just a number of HTML pages linked together, and you're adding PHP to it to get some data from the server before you display your site to a client). Seriously, do this before you go to the next step!

4) Next, look at PHP frameworks. Why use a framework? Because it has most of the things done for you already pretty much efficiently, and you just have to use it's in-built functions. CodeIgniter is a good framework to start with. Read through the documentation available with the framework, and try implementing those in your website.

How do you see PHP in action without having a website? You can set up a server quickly in your local computer and run web pages on your browser to test things out. Look online for WAMP or XAMPP, download and install it. There would be minor configurations you need to do, but the documentation will help you with all that.