[stephen_g]

That’s not exactly true though - although I believe technically in all languages if you know it well enough, you do tend to read by looking at whole words basically as images, that’s beside the point.

In the English speaking world some places moved away from phonics for teaching kids to read but are moving back since the change was considered a mistake. I think I saw a breakdown saying something like 60% of English words can basically actually just be directly sounded out phonetically, another 20% need some knowledge of rules for the type of exception, 10% are from another language (like French) so you need some knowledge of the source language’s pronunciation rules, and then only the last 5 or 10% are actually true exceptions that need to be specifically learnt (I can’t remember the exact percentages but it was something around those stated). I’m sure it can feel a bit inscrutable (as I’ve said in comments I’m learning French so having similar but slightly different frustration) but it’s not as bad as people make it out to be.