[Izkata]

Rules exist, but most are never taught and instead only learned through exposure. It's why "ghoti" is a trick - you have to break several rules of English pronunciation to get "fish" out of that.

Here's a page where someone tried to reconstruct as many of those rules as possible: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html - obviously it can't eliminate all exceptions but it does surprisingly well.

Rules 6-8 are relevant to one of your examples, including the explanation afterwards.

[int_19h]

The complexity of these rules, and the number of exceptions that you need to learn notwithstanding the rules, can be roughly estimated for any given language by training a language model on word <-> IPA correspondence for that language (using a subset of the vocabulary as a training set), and then seeing how well it can predict the remaining words. You can run it in either direction, too, to separately measure the difficulty of reading (word -> IPA) and writing (IPA -> word) that language.

This was actually done for a number of languages including English:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321

You can see how languages with true phonemic spellings tend to be in the >90% range on both reading and writing, with Esperanto at 99%. Spanish and German are in 60-80% range. English is dismal at ~30% for both, though, with only French and Chinese being harder to write, and all other languages tested being easier to read.

[lucasoshiro]

Nice!

[98codes]

I couldn't help to look and see if the company behind commercials that are burned into my brain from 40 years ago are still a thing, and lo, Hooked on Phonics is still going strong!

This page[1] walks through the basics of phonemic awareness that children need to learn via exposure & repetition in order to learn to apply that aural learning to reading.

It makes me wonder if a program like this, aimed at English-speaking children, might help those adults learning to speak & read English if they could put up with being addressed as if they were a child.

[1] https://www.hookedonphonics.com/reading/phonemic-awareness/