If you're just learning then new Eevee renderer in 2.80 is great for 90% of things and is pretty much real-time. For those final shots you can use cycles with your CPU, it's going to take longer but lack of a GPU shouldn't stop you as a hobbiest.

edit: after some more reading I'm not sure if Eevee works on CPU, but I don't have blender 2.8 on a cpu-only machine to test this.