You could still start with other resources on COBOL like http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/course/. There are some COBOL compilers available for free, but most of them are limited in some way and as most people do not have a host at home. There are still some notable differences. As Kapitan stated, a good knowledge of MVS, TSO, ISPF, JCL and many more are required to succeed on the host. There are lots of legacy COBOL handbooks available for reference and for free - these will be helpful, you just have to search for them: Search for COBOL PDF Reference
Legacy COBOL code is often full of tricks (sometimes well established, sometimes really dirty) to make the program fast or small or something in between. Programmers from modern languages often struggle to get the language concept. COBOL is also a bloated language. I can really recommend to learn to type (10 fingers blind) as IDEs are nowhere to what modern IDEs do for modern languages like Java. The basics of the language are easy to learn as COBOL can really be readable.
Young people should not learn COBOL - if you like software development, COBOL will never get you to the real fun parts of it. If you like software development, you are better of with other languages. Even though COBOL programmers are needed, the payment does not reflect that urge. For that reason, even if you are not interested in software development and ‘only do it for the money’, you are better of with other languages, too.
That said, if you are new to COBOL and still want to learn it: Have fun.