| How do you spell "guitar"? It's not spelled like it sounds, and not every English speaker (never mind people who can't speak English) is going to know how to spell it. Some may try to spell it "gitar", "geetar" or even "getar", for example. While these maybe be "obviously" wrong spelling for skilled spellers, they're not so for everyone. Even with a simple word like "ball", it's not obvious that it should have two l's at the end. Someone might spell it "bal" when they hear it. Spelling reform[1] movements have pointed out these and many other issues with English spelling, but unfortunately the alternatives they've come up with are just not widely known, and at least some of them still have their own problems (such as lack of standardization due to different phonemic spellings for words spoken by people with different accents). Even were there some magical alternate spelling system for English that was widely known among English speakers, it would still be a stumbling block for people who don't know English, as would the words of any other language.. as long as there are people who don't speak that language. So any word-based system is going to be problematic and error-prone for some people. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform |