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> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically.
Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges. Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ"). There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages). That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms.
However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc |