An interesting trait of the balkan languages is the perceived link between the spelling and phonetics, resulting in the phrase "Piši kao što govoriš" / "Write as you speak"
A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2]
Now the orthography is hard mainly due to: (1) change in the language not reflected in the writing, (2) etymological speeling choices made on standardization and (3) latent phonological information.
Instances of (1) include graphemes likes "au" [o].
Example of (2) is "pied" with final letter here to refer to Greek "podo".
Point (3) is more complex. Take "parent" were final t is mute. Its presence makes is clear it’s related to "parental". Some with pairs like "grand" / "grande" were in the feminine form the final d is pronounced.
Edit: Tibetan alphabet is notoriously difficult, and Thai alphabet is quite hard too, so the problem exists elsewhere as well even when staying in the realm of alphabets.
The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
?? I dont' quite follow what you're saying. The sound 'o' can be written in French in a lot of different ways, some of them even don't even have an 'o' in them ("au", "eau", "aux" "aux" and I probably forgot some). It's notoriously difficult to write things in French just because of the discrepancy between what you hear and what you should write.
By convention, in French every time you find written: "au", "eau", "aux" "aux" you pronounce it "o".
If you hear "o", it may be "o" or any of the above.
There may be small "nuances" like with Z in some languages that can be hard or soft (there are anyway "coded" rules - not necessarily "simple" - but only a handful of exceptions), Italian:
http://www.attori.com/dizione/Diz11.htm
Now go to English and read aloud (say):
flier
plier
pier
tier
tire
It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language writing conventions you can read the language just fine, but that's tautology.
Roughly half of the letters written in French are not pronounced, either because they come too soon in the word, or because they are followed by another letter or because they are too late in the word. Unless the next word starts with specific letter, in that case you do pronounce the ending of the previous word. Sure, for a native speaker it could be very easy to read and write, and it might be determined by very consistent set of few dozen rules, but I would say that reading or writing French is anything but straightforward.
Au in French is never pronounced as it is written (like augen in German or aulico in Italian), but always as a O
Once you know the rules it's pretty easy
Also French (like Italian, Spanish and others) have accents to help you decide how to pronounce a word
Now consider these popular examples of English inconsistencies
The bandage was wound around his leg to cover his wound.
The insurance on the invalid was invalid
I did not object to the object.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.
(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.
Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C.
It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it).
Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that
C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C
C+e, C+i = soft C
So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same
Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though
Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri...
hard c = Voiceless velar plosive
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive
They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)
When you have a language that's half nordic, half french, half german, with tons of words from elsewhere, the rules aren't really going to be rules. (there is of course a much more linguistically accurate way to say this)
Especially it's false in French with 17 different ways to write "e" or "o" even though it's spoken the same...
There is an excellent TEDx video where two linguists that are advocating for a reform of the French orthography invent a word and then write a script to list all the ways it can be spelled, following the existing rules of French spelling. The result is 240 ways to spell it.
Russian has progressed/evolved more than many of the other Slavic languages (due to more speakers, being a part of an empire etc.). So there are significant differences between Russian and most other Slavic languages (even the closest ones, Ukranian and Belorussian). These differences are everywhere: in word forms, tenses, stress, pronunciation etc.
Many other Slavic languages (especially Balkanian) retain a lot of forms, sounds, meanings that are archaic by Russian standards: anything from Bulgarian `ъ` sound which disappeared from Russian centuries ago, to words like `лепа` (beautiful) in Serbian which hasn't been used in Russian for over a century, to words like Polish `uroda` (beauty) which switched its meaning to mean "ugly" in Russian.
And the list goes on: locative and vocative cases exist in Serbian, haven't existed in Russian for a long time; definiteness of Macedonian and Bulgarian hasn't existed in Russian for a long time, if ever; etc. etc.
So all in all, other Slavic speakers have a higher chance and luck understanding Russian speakers, than Russian speakers other Slavik languages.
Locative example: в саду (vs о саде) Vocative example: Маш, иди сюда
I'd guestimate at least 10% speaks both English or German relatively fluently, and I personally don't know anyone from here that speaks Russian fluently.