Does Kali take too long to learn as a martial arts?

That depends on the teacher and what style he teaches, some would have you do two man drills with a partner early on, some would prefer you learn solo first. Most of the time having you do solo drills has to do with him having no time to train you one on one due to the large number of students in a class setting. You're usually paired off with a classmate later on. If you are taking private lessons on the other hand, you are usually doing two man drills most of the time since the instructor himself would be your partner. As for sparring, those are usually reserved til you are proficient enough to defend yourself and not accidentally hurt someone due to lack of control. This of course, is assuming your instructor is old school and isn't teaching a sports version of the Filipino martial arts, where they used padded sticks and heavy armor for sparring. Because you must understand that even if you are just sparring with eskrima sticks which is safer than doing it with blades, there is still a chance of incurring injury during the heat of sparring, especially since most old school styles usually do not use padded sticks or armour. One thing an instructor doesn't want is to have a student get injured unnecessarily as this could lead to lawsuits. He can usually judge when a student is ready to spar and when he isn't. So just be patient and ask him when you might be able to spar. Besides, a year is not that long, it usually takes a new student with no previous martial arts background longer to actually be good enough to spar in other martial arts.