Besides your strong desire to learn, your preferred swim wear including swimming goggles and a swimming cap will do just fine. Ear plugs and nose clip will help however it is best to learn without. The important thing is to get started.

The length of time it takes to teach someone how to swim is completely different from one individual to the next. As a general rule of thumb, children learn over a number of years and the industry standard for teaching an adult to swim one length front-crawl with breathing is 20 hours of teaching.

From a technical perspective the real gains are to be made in the stroke. In front-crawl the legs play a part in propulsion but their main purpose is for balance. So the arms play a significant role in answering the question how do I swim faster? The stroke is composed of 5 parts, the entry, catch, pull, push and recovery. The pull and push phases are very important if you want to swim faster. Furthermore the benefit of pushing back against the water with a bent arm is simple. You are stronger!