[sph]

A thing that no one told me until I was fluent in spoken English, is that while it has 5 vowel symbols, it has some 25 vowel sounds, and there is no good way to know from a written word to know how to pronounce it.

And then there's British English, where pronunciation of words like "margarine", "Greenwich", "Frome" or "Gloucester" makes no logical sense at all. I know the history behind the pronunciation, but it is silly to write it one way and pronounce it another.

I guess I am too Latin for this barbaric language.