[yhager]

Oh, it's a huge effort! These bodies meet and discuss what the proper spelling of words should be, or they make up new words, and then they publish those guidelines for journalists, authors, and anyone who wants to speak "properly" to follow.

It gives the language a good balance between spelling and pronouncing - that's why you can pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written (I think there are very very few exceptions, if at all). But this comes at a price of losing ability to track meaning some times.

Sometimes it is not going so well, for example, look at the tumultuous German reform of 1996.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1...

[filoleg]

I don’t think that the existence of those bodies is the reason for being able to pronounce most words in German and Spanish exactly how they are written.

Afaik there is no such regulatory body for Russian language, and yet as long as you know the alphabet, you should be able to pronounce almost every single word correctly (even if you have never seen or heard it before).

There are a few exceptions, but I cannot even recall them right now, aside from super common ones that make natural sense. Example: “что” aka “chto”, with “ch” being pronounced more like “sh” (which would naturally end up happening if you try pronouncing it as written aka “chto” a few times).