Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.

Polish grammar is terrifying.

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.

Pear (along with pair and pare) rhymes with bear (and bare). Peer rhymes with fear (and beer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

(Gallagher and English language; the pronunciation part starts at 1:50.)

So and do don't even rhyme, nor do sew and dew! WTF?

Then there's the words the U.K. and the U.S. don't agree on like route (in the U.K. it rhymes with root, in the U.S. usually, but not always, with out). I pronounce route and router to rhyme with out and outer but my wife pronounces route to rhyme with root and router to rhyme with outer.

> Even French beats English in this respect, and that is an absurdly low bar considering the accumulated mess that is French orthography.

Even though there is a good amount of redundancy, once some subtleties like the liaison are understood, French spelling to pronunciation is a many-to-one[ or two] mapping, while English is a many-to-many multifunction mess.

My favourite example: "banana" has three a's, no two of which are pronounced the same.

"The Chaos" is an excellent demonstration of the irregularities of English's spelling/pronunciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html

I have recently been pulled-up by a fellow native speaker over my pronunciation of the word "poor" ("poo-uh"). She pronounces it the same as "pore" or "paw". Many other words have exhibited the same shift: e.g. moor/more, boor/bore. My natural accent is RP, but I think the distinction I like to draw is not RP. Most of the people I meet that draw this distinction are from the North. Scots, in particular, seem inclined to draw the old distinctions more than southerners.

I would say Hangul is regular, not phonetic. Sounds might change depending on their position when written, but I wouldn't call it particularly complex, certainly not compared to English orthography.

But even then, the rules are fairly consistent and mostly logical. And even then the transformations are not drastically different from the consonant’s “base” sound.

Some of those transformations are a byproduct of hangul losing a vowel and a handful of consonants, and Korean itself going through a change similar to Middle English > Modern English over the course of Joseon’s 400+ year history.