[vintermann]

While English is especially bad, few languages don't have the same to some lesser degree.

In Norwegian, vovels have drifted so that the letter "o" is pronounced mostly like what other countries would write "u", and there's the extra vowel "å" which we pronounce like what most other countries write "o". Except... not always. In common words like "for", "og", "som", or in "Norge", the "o" is indeed pronounced in the international manner, like we would write with an "å" if we were consistent. And the rules for long or short vowels are inconsistent too. You can be confident that vowels before a double consonant are short, but not that vowels before a single consonant are long. "For", for instance, if pronounced with a long u-sound, means "fodder", but with a short o-sound it is the preposition "for" (more or less the same as the English one). That should have been written "får" if the phonetics made sense, but "får" (long o-sound) is already a word for sheep.

Some people actually write "fôr" for fodder and "fór" for rushed (another meaning of f - long-u sound - r), introducing letters that aren't part of our official alphabet.