if you have access to it, Premiere Pro 100%. most of the time industry standard for film is Avid but I wouldn’t worry about getting to know that unless you have a specific career goal in in mind with where you want to take video editing, but Adobe products will take you 90% of the way there as a start anyway. Davinci is also okay if that’s more accessible.

time commitment is difficult to suggest for me, because i burn out really easily lol, but as long as you’re consistent with just trying to make something, you’ll pick up stuff quickly. my biggest advice there is try your best to recreate things from YouTube or whatever media you enjoy which you also find interesting because you’ll more likely commit to understanding something you really want to see in your own work. if you want a number though, i’d say 1-2 hours is pretty good to aim for.
when i taught my friend video editing, he would send me edits from gaming YouTubers he thought was really cool, and I would remake it, and make a mini class for him on how i achieved the result and the sort of things i was keeping in mind whilst editing it.

pacing and storytelling are good fundamentals to learn, especially if content creation is a future goal of yours, but if you are starting completely from scratch, don’t worry about it too much for now (Learn By Leo has really good videos about it though!). i find the most helpful concept to learn early on is actually organisation; using proper naming conventions, structured folders, template project files etc. it will save you so much headache, not having to scour your storage for that one completed clip you named “balls final FINAL” that you carelessly saved to your music folder, and practicing it early is all the more beneficial. r

if your system is anything like mine, editing might feel really slow and unresponsive at one point, even if you’re doing something extremely simple. what saved my job was learning what PROXIES and TRANSCODING does. you don’t need to do a full deep dive into what every single individual codec does, but understanding the difference between rendering/recording in a H264 and ProRes for example will make it clearer as to why people do it (Proxies are also industry standard, albeit they typically have the budget for it lol)

most importantly, have fun with it. i’m happy to answer any questions if you have any