People often say that the English spelling is weird or illogical. As a non-native speaker, I disagree. The English spelling makes perfect sense. It’s the English pronunciation which is really strange and inconsistent.
BS. Phonetic alphabets are _much_ easier to learn for everyone. In Russia and Ukraine pretty much every child can read by the time they enter the first grade. It's _that_ easy because both alphabets are phonetic (although it's only one-way in case of Russian).
Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize. It was not at all helpful. I also ended up learning English as a mostly written language, so after moving to the US, I kept getting surprised by how familiar written words are actually pronounced.
E.g. it took me a while to explain to a nurse over the phone that I may have pneumonia and need an appointment. Why the heck that leading "p" is completely silent?!?
In the US too, reading is generally handled in Kindergarten, the year before first grade. If your parents didn't teach you before that, like mine did.
> Meanwhile, when I was learning English there basically was one spelling rule: memorize.
There are rules though, that we're ad-hoc taught as kids, or just absorb through exposure. Just because there's a lot of exceptions doesn't mean they don't exist. Here's an attempt at listing them out: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html
I keep hearing that students in the US struggle with reading. With something like 60% of students not being able to read proficiently.
Inlcuding a truly stunning case of a valedictorian high school graduate who couldn't read: https://www.kktv.com/2025/02/28/former-high-school-honors-st... Or the "whole language" approach to reading, which sounds completely bonkers to me.
I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.
It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.
A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
I also find the hand-wringing about English accents somewhat surprising. Yes, different accents exist, and yes, English has a much wider variation than (urban) Russian (there are things in the countryside that urban dwellers haven’t heard for a century), but phonemic orthographies are a thing, and though children in e.g. Moscow may perpetually struggle with orthographic distinctions that no longer correspond to anything in their accent, the idea of a spelling competition remains about as laughable as that of a shoelace-tying one. Nobody makes you represent the many mergers of English with a single letter in your new orthography (though it would be funny).
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cyrillic_alternates...., rightmost column
BS yourself: The English -- e.e. Latin -- alphabet is just as phonetic as any other.
As long as you don't fuck up your pronounciation as thoroughly as English has done.
