True, but those five hours don't necessarily have to be done in the air.
When I got back from my JAA PPL in Florida, I first scheduled a two-hour ground school session with an instructor. We spent those two hours essentially planning and then flying a mock flight, covering everything from obtaining MET and NOTAMs, submitting flightplans, club rules regarding reservation of aircraft, ATC services/clearances and R/T, airspace, navigation, to how to pay the bill at the end. We even squeezed in a visit to the MET/NAV briefing room at the tower.
A week or so later (this was in the winter period), we flew a one-hour local flight to get familiar with the area and do the usual club checkout things like stalls and steep turns. An another few weeks later we flew to a short grass strip some 20 minutes away for a few touch and gos there. In Florida, landing on grass runways was forbidden due to insurance reasons... :-(
Total instruction time: 6 hours. Total time of flight: 2 hours. Then she let me loose on the club aircraft. I recommend doing something similar to everybody. And the cost of this is peanuts if you compare it to your savings by going to the USA.