A new study has suggested it would take 1,040 hours and around €31,000 to learn Irish.

Data compiled by translation service LanguageLine indicates it would cost around €30 for a newcomer to learn our national language.

That makes Irish a more challenging and expensive language to learn that some others. French, for example, takes around 550 hours to get to grips with at approx €30.50 an hour, while with Spanish you would be looking at 600 hours at a slightly cheaper rate of €26 per hour.

Asian languages rank as the hardest languages to learn, with the likes of Hindi, Persian, Bengali and Russian all weighing in at an 1,100 hour commitment.

However, the most difficult major languages are Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Korean - with LanguageLine suggesting a new student will need to commit 2,200 hours to learn any of them.

It is likely to prove an expensive task to learn a particularly challenging language as well, with an estimated cost of €35 per hour for Mandarin - or a total of €77,000.

For those looking for a cheaper language to pick up, Telugu - spoken by around 81 million people - will cost around €10.50 per hour to learn - accumulating to only €11,550 over the 1,100 hours.

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