Yeah, that's my biggest issue with English, personally. Been living in an english-speaking country for close to 15 years, zero issues with writing/reading/speaking comprehension. Not trying to brag, but it is extremely difficult for someone to out me as a non-native speaker based on writing.
But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.
In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.
And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.
Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.
> In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written.
That's decidedly not true for Russian, although a native speaker might not notice it quite so readily. But, firstly, there's akanie and ikanie for unstressed vowels. Then consider e.g. pervasive devoicing of voiced consonants at the end of the word and before unvoiced consonants; basically every word that ends with "-b", "-d", "-g", "-z" is not spelled as it is pronounced. Then there's the mess with spelling vowels after sibilants, with spellings like "ци" and "ща" being literally the opposite wrt hard/soft consonant distinction. And then there are phonemes which aren't even usually acknowledged as such nor reflected in spelling, such as fricative "г" (which is normative for some words even in the standard / Moscow dialect), or the voiced counterpart of "щ".
I'll grant you that it's way better than English or French! Reading is mostly not a problem in practice because, while not phonemic, the mapping is still highly consistent. OTOH spelling a Russian word based on hearing it is much harder than in languages with truly mostly phonemic spelling such as Serbian or Finnish; take a look at this: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
But pronunciation of words that I've seen in writing for years but never said outloud before? God save me getting those right on my first or second or third try.
In comparison, Russian (my first language) and Japanese (a couple years of self-study + a couple more years of college classes) are a breeze in terms of figuring out the pronunciation (not talking about kanji here, assuming the reader knows proper furigana for whatever kanji in a word they are trying to pronounce). In 99% of the cases, it is pronounced exactly as it is written. If you know cyrillic alphabet, you can pretty much correctly pronounce every single word written in Russian on the first try (minus very few notable exceptions), even if you don't know anything else about the language at all.
And the exceptions tend to fall on such few very commonly used words, you usually nail them really quickly, and they sorta make sense. For one example of it in Russian, it would be "chto" (aka "what"). Very common word used all the time. But "ch" in it is more commonly pronounced as "sh", which feels rather natural in terms of how the mouth moves when trying to pronounce "ch" quickly in speech.
Note: however, Russian grammar is a hellhole of massive proportions compared to both English and Japanese. If you think that English is very free-form and flexible/messy in terms of sentence structure compared to Japanese (which I agree with), Russian grammar takes "free-form" and "messy" to another level.