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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable.

The best European language is, of course, Italian.

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Actually modern English still has the remnants of declension (conjugation is to verb as declension is to noun); personal pronouns. I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.

You could argue that the genitive case (possessive) is also declension in English; i.e. <noun>'s, <plural noun ending in s>'.

English has way more diphthongs than French does, and French spelling is also much more regular than English (99% of the time, I can predict what an unfamiliar French word means if I see how it's spelled. This would be much harder in English, which is my native language.)

As an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree.

Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a unique way.

I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly).

Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major) European languages (hello French and German). But it is not the quicker language to learn at an acceptable level IMHO.

Perhaps, but this is not a language feature. The only reason that English looks like an easy language to learn is that everyone is now adjusted to less-than-perfect English of non-native speakers. And if you choose to speak Italian (or, G-d forbid, French), you'd better do it well enough.

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