This was so interesting I love yuval
there was a poem published in the goddamn 1920s, called "The Chaos," written by a Dutch speaker and its sole purpose is to make fun of how difficult English is to learn because of how many different ways the same set of words can be pronounced and how many different spellings are pronounced the same way.
in English, "pronouncing something the wrong way because you've only ever read it and never heard it spoken" is insanely common even for native speakers. (for me, "colonel" and "indict" are the worst; I pronounced them phonetically for years in my head before I found out they're actually pronounced "KERN-null" and "in-DITE") there is a goddamn meme about how we don't know how "gif" is properly pronounced because "g" can either be hard, like in "gift," or soft, like in "giraffe."
it is much less common in other languages, especially very standardized ones where you know for a fact that this letter combination is always pronounced this specific way; like, you could give me a book in German and I might not understand most of it, but I could probably read it aloud fairly well because German has a very standardized spelling.
this is partially because of how English is actually a bunch of other languages in a trench coat (our grammar is German! like a third of our vocabulary is French! "COT" AND "BANDANA" ARE HINDI LOANWORDS!)
the lack of consistency in English in spelling and pronunciation is by far the most common complaint I have heard from non-native speakers. I think the phrase my dad used is "English is easy to learn but impossible to master." it is frankly incredibly small-minded to assume that your language is easy to learn, just because it's easy to you.
