[mattgibson]

I'm told that Italian, for example, has such a regularity that pretty much every word is spelled phonetically, so guessing the spelling always works.

[adambard]

In my limited experience, this is mostly true of Spanish, and nearly for Polish as well (although the latter has a few sneaky digraphs and some regular exceptions).

I'm also told that this is true of German.

[gurkendoktor]

> I'm also told that this is true of German.

Not quite. We have a bunch of French loanwords that are confusing to spell, some sounds that blend into each other (eu/äu, e/ä, ch/g), we pronounce a 'd' like a 't' at the ent of a wort (so Germans are perpetually confused if it's spelled Standard or Standart), and our markers for whether a vowel is long or short are pretty inconsistent.

[CapitalistCartr]

All of the Romance languages are well structured, in stark contrast to English. There is no "GHOTI = FISH" nonsense in them.

[scrollaway]

Spoken ambiguity and written ambiguity are two very different things and English should not be judged on the merits of the British-English accent.

(You speak of the structure of Romance languages...)