While I agree with many of your points comparing Spanish and English, I disagree with several points:
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.
I agree with all this - especially the point about Mexico, etc. I was exaggerating a bit to bring out the contrasts, and as a student and someone learning how to teach the language, these contrasts seem stronger to me than they really are.
It's either Mexico and Texas, or Méjico and Tejas. Someone might mix across languages, but that does not mean that there is actually a formal exception to the rule.
Not at all. In Mexico, it's written México and pronounced Méjico. So that is definitely an exception to the pronunciation of x as a ks sound.
The spelling rule you imply is not correct either: the same Spanish speakers who write Texas for the state, write Tejano for the Latin music originating there--both of those spellings being the most widespread in both Texas and Mexico.
So I dug this up a bit, because I'm accustomed to the form "Méjico" in Spain.
You are right that México is written with an X but pronounced with a jota. However it has a special status of topónimo (place name), which sometimes don't have a translation (thank god).
E.g. "Washington" is not pronounced with a sharp S, it's just pronounced as in the original language. Or Wyoming is pronounced as "uaióming", not "bioming". Which is exactly what happens with México, in old spanish the X was pronounced as jota.
Spelling = correct pronunciation in Spanish is like 99.9% correct. The exceptions are almost always imported words. Even the tildes help you out to know how to pronounce a word you haven't seen before completely correctly, with the right stresses on each syllable. English is an embarrassment in comparison. If we did a total overhaul and simplification of English to remove all the inconsistencies, it'd be far easier to learn for everyone going forward (albeit at the inconvenience of everyone alive today).
In Spanish, word order is more fluid than in English--greatly facilitated by the fact that the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd...) of a verb is an ending rather than a separate pronoun. You can quite acceptably start sentences with subject, verb, direct object, even indirect object.
And while there are more rules than in English, there is also a much greater dependence on context to understand basic meaning. If you use loismo, 'lo' can refer to: you, he, she, it. If you don't pick up on a sometimes subtle contextual marker, you can quickly be talking at cross-purposes. The need for context also results from the much smaller vocabulary in Spanish, so meaning has to be interpolated by context or remain imprecise. (As a visual demonstration, look at any Spanish-English dictionary and see how much wider the English-to-Spanish section is than its counterpart.)
Your view that spelling = correct pronunciation is not as ironclad as you make it out to be. It has exceptions: Mexico and Texas being a prime examples--the x being pronounced like a jota.
I agree overall that Spanish has a clearer grammar that is more widely applied, but I don't think it's nearly as clearly defined as you make it out to be.