English is phonetic enough that if you know either the written or spoken form of a word you can take a pretty good guess at the other one, and will almost certainly recognize it if it is presented to you. It's just harder than it needs to be.
I wish I had a $currency for every time I used a word that I understand, can spell, know well - and got laughed at by people speaking English natively for the mispronunciation..
So I beg to differ: Going from the written form to the pronunciation is failing quite often, at least for me.