[hn_throwaway_99]

Yeah, I honestly can't think of any language where spelling is as difficult as English. Japanese: the 2 phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are extremely easy to learn IMO, nearly all letters are either vowels or a consonant-vowel pair. Russian: very phonetic, there are some exceptions to how things are pronounced but the rules are very regular. Even French, which has tons of silent letters and heck, silent syllables, is very regular, and I nearly always know how to pronounce something if I read it.

[gizmo686]

For Japanese, the choose to talk only about the phonetic system is doing a lot of work, as it is (mostly) just used for grammatical purposes, with most content words being mostly or entirely composed of the non-phonetic Kanji. A typical Japanese student is still learning to write until high school. Presumably, Chinese is similarly difficult for the same reason, but I'm not familiar with that.

Hebrew's writing system has vowels, but they are typically omitted.