[FabHK]

It's a remarkable fact, I think, that spoken modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) has only about 400 distinct syllables ignoring tones. With the 4 tones plus neutral pronunciation, there are about 1300, maybe 1500 (including rare ones) distinct syllables. They're basically all of the form

  consonant (optional) + vowel/diphthong + n/ng (optionally)

(typically called "initial + final" in this context).

(Note that older Chinese "dialects" such as Cantonese or Teochew retain many more distinct syllables. For example, the infamous "shi shi shi shi" "poem", consisting only of "shi" sounds in Mandarin (neglecting tones), contains 11 distinct syllables (neglecting tones) in Teochew.)

English or German, on the other hand, have somewhere around 8000 distinct syllables. (Think of "strict", "fractal", "Angstschweiß", "Hampsthwaite", "strengths", etc.)

[FabHK]

By the way, you may not have encountered "Hampsthwaite" before, but you probably know how to pronounce it. This doesn't work in Chinese.

[snaily]

Honestly, though, of all languages written with an alphabet (Latin or no), English is the worst when it comes to mapping from writing to pronunciation. Sure, it might better than Chinese, but flaunting it in public looks rather absurd even when comparing to, say, French.

And that's not even comparing to languages with a phonemic orthography (where the mapping from pronunciation to spelling is essentially injective) like Finnish or Turkish (which is also extremely regular in terms of grammmar, I'm told). English is terrible in this regard.

[adimitrov]

Now try pronouncing Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Worcester, Derby, Edinburgh, Argyll… Granted, the latter two are Gaelic in origin, but it's not like English spelling — especially of place names — is terribly phonetic.

English orthograhpy is in fact widely known for having [less systematicity](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) than many of its Indo-European neighbors.