[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!)