[stahorn]

As someone that speaks English as my second language, the trick of English is to memorize all the exceptions and then accept that the English spelling is just made up to mess with foreigners.

Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words from reading.

[somenameforme]

A big one is also "ed" like "jogged". It looks like jog ged, so surely it's pronounced that way. Bahaha, no - gotcha! It's jogd! But we like extra letters and there must be vowels even when completely and absolutely unpronounced. Not sure if this is better or worse than Russian which seems to have no problem with squeezing a half dozen consonants side by side and saying, 'good luck.'

[encipriano]

Honestly English spelling is the worst at least of Western Europe. Its so bad it that unless you know some IPA and learn the words pronunciation one by one youre misunderstood all the time. Its also imposible to guess with 100% accuracy how a word is said unless being told.

Schwas everywhere randomly (why is it adjust (uhd 'juhst) and not ad 'juhst when we have accept (ak 'sept). In German this is way more consistent. Diphthongs everywhere, almost no pure monophthongs. Which is a language feature but in written form is also fucked. I tend to have problems with oh vs aa sounds. E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish. Stress isnt written. Consonants not only can be spelled differently but also said differently. Gif vs djif, cell vs celt, china vs machine

This makes the language way harder in a high level than it should be if it had had some spelling reform at some point. Sorry for not using IPA Im on the phone.

[dessimus]

>E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish.

There's two pronunciations of 'polish' though: the one you mentioned being what one does to grandmother's candlesticks, and 'pou lish' referring to someone or something from 'pou luhnd'.