Four hours a week for ten weeks, twelve to a class, taught mostly in English and built around situations rather than grammar tables.
Greetings and courtesies, numbers and money, buying food, giving an address to a taxi, what a clinic and a pharmacy say, what your landlord will say to you, and enough of the script to find the right shop and the right ferry.
What it is not is written Dhivehi at length or the formal register. Those are another course and hardly anybody wants them. Being understood the first time by a shopkeeper is the whole aim, and the teacher will tell you in week one that pronunciation is the battle.