I feel like this is especially true for English since it seems to me there are no spelling rules that convey pronunciation. You can have 2 words spelled completely the same save from one letter and the pronunciation is nowhere near the same.

I'm not sure how this is in other languages, but in my native german (which is always said to be difficult to learn) when you understand the spelling rules you can always assume the correct pronunciation of a word. Certain letter combinations always amount to the same way of pronouncing it.

I guess this is because both languages started out in the germanic language family, but over the course of history english adapted way more from other languages and just made them their own. Including differences in spelling, but maybe not as much pronunciation. Best example is "Bologna", which is still the italian/latin spelling, but no one near italy would call it "Baloney" .

I'm always amazed at how native speakers learn to write things like that, since you cant count on what you hear at all.

As a French Canadian moving from Quebec to Ontario, that struggle was real.

My English learning process was me being a eight year old kid who wanted to play diablo. No clue about shit. Barely able to read in the first place and just going from one word which is similar to one in my native language to the next similar one. Like "ok, intelligence looks a lot like intelligenz. Dexterity makes my bow do more damage so it should be something like speed or whatever" so basically trial and error over the years. The pronunciation was accordingly. As an example, strength was "stren g t hö". Not sure how I'm supposed to write what i said back then xD Still to this day from reading and such and not practicing enough speaking English some are way off.

I call this being bookish, pronounced "bockish"

Jokes on you, I pronounce most of words in English wrong, because no one bothered to teach me proper pronunciation at school.

I always vaguely wondered where in-FRAIR'd light fit into the spectrum because I only heard people talking about infra-red and ultraviolet...

Read a quote somewhere a while back, to paraphrase:

Never make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word; it means that their reading vocabulary has outgrown their spoken vocabulary.

The colour Beige was my downfall 🙈

Fuck, it's me

This is why I love spanish as my second language. You don't have to guess what the word sounds like. Spelling and pronunciation always match.