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shiroiuma | 6 days ago

Written English makes plenty of sense, but it's really complicated because you need to know the etymology of the words to understand the logic. It's not just made-up; there's reasons for the "rules" (like why a word is pronounced the way it is, despite the spelling). But new learners don't have time to learn Greek and Latin roots and other such stuff, and under-educated native English speakers won't know much of this stuff either.

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Pooge|6 days ago

The fact is that even native speakers may mispronounce words if it's the first time they say it. For example, words that they encountered in written form only.

Or they write words incorrectly because it doesn't even closely match the pronunciation.

shiroiuma|5 days ago

Yes, of course. This happens to me too: there's words I've never heard pronounced, so I don't actually know how to pronounce them (though you can usually solve this by using Google Translate's text-to-speech function).

I never said English was a superbly designed language, just that it does make sense when you look at the entire history and etymology. But yeah, it's a heavily-kludged mess, though it is pretty good at being accessible for new learners just because it's flexible and has a relatively simple grammar.