Learning the Greek alphabet shouldn't take more than 10 hours. Not that one needs to. I never did. However, in a given discipline, practitioners tend to be consistent on which Greek letters they use for which concepts. As long as you spend time on a given topic, the Greek symbols should become ingrained - just as knowing how to write a for loop in C would become if you do it often enough.

And I would hope people studying math spend a lot more than hundreds of hours on it. If someone came and complained about the arcane syntax used in programming languages and hadn't spent, say, 100 hours programming, I don't think you would give much weight to their views.