[Tomis02]

> People with English as their mother tongue have some advantages - we actually recognise a huge variety of vowel sounds because various English accents contain them

Not so sure about that. For example, I noticed it takes a bit of effort to get native English speakers to pronounce the ы sound, or to get them to hear how the ь letter affects pronunciation.

> We also know pronunciation and writing are completely disjoint: anyone coming from a language where you say what you read has a big disadvantage.

I don't quite agree. I come from a language where the spelling is almost phonetic (so, not totally disjoint from pronunciation), and it's very easy for children to learn reading and writing, which means they quickly move on to more important things. Meanwhile, children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly. And conversely, when they hear a new word (or name) they need to look up how to spell it. I don't see an advantage, it's just a waste of energy.

It was relatively easy for me to learn the spelling of English words because I already knew a reasonable amount of French, so it was quite intuitive to spell "restaurant" or "renaissance". But for someone with English as a first language, I suspect it would have involved a lot of memorising.

[robocat]

> I noticed it takes a bit of effort to get native English speakers to pronounce the ы sound, or to get them to hear how the ь letter affects pronunciation.

But you are saying English speakers can learn it? How do Romance language speakers do? I'm just making a generalisation, which is not universal and there are plenty of vowel and consonant sounds English speakers really struggle to learn.

> children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly.

Absolutely: it is a serious downside of English and plenty of adults never learn to spell well. I have seen the advantages of saying it like it is spelled in Spanish. But that isn't relevant to my point that English speakers have a natural understanding that spelling is disjoint from pronunciation. It maybe doesn't help much - hearing English speakers saying words they have learnt from books is painful!

Secondly, many English speakers often try to pronounce foreign names correctly - another habit that teaches us pronunciation (a little!)