You can only "spell it exactly how it sounds" in languages like Italian or Spanish, not in English.
Are you sure? I'm a native Spanish speaker and mastered the "whole bunch" (ce, ci, que, qui, gue, gui) by the age of four.
Let me remind you that I was answering to your comment where you say:
...read signs and essays aloud without having the faintest idea of what they're saying.
This can be done just learning the independent sound of each letter and the six exceptions that I mentioned.
Graphic accent rules are a bit more complex, but we also learn them by the time we're seven or eight years, so we can use in our writing. They're not essential for reading.
Depends on accent. Some regions do diferenciate. Same with S/C/Z
Depends on accent. Some regions do diferenciate.
Maybe because, as I wrote in a previous comment, they speak another language that does have different sounds.
But again: it's irrelevant for a foreigner learning to read standard Spanish. When you learn English they won't teach you cockney, they teach you some standard pronuntiation.
That doesn't sound right. What variety of Spanish are you familiar with that sometimes distinguishes B from V?
The only glaring exception I run into in Spanish is "que" being pronounced "ke."
Doesn't seem that way to me; the native speakers I’ve known tend to pronounce the X’s different ways in:
México / Oaxaca
vs.
Xochilmilco
vs.
Ixtlan / Tepexpan
"X" in Mexican might be shorthand for sharp mystery consonant.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reajuste_de_las_sibilantes_del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
With the Serbian Latin/Croatian alphabet it gets a little complicated because it uses digraphs such as lj(љ in Cyrillic), nj(њ)and dž(џ).
People are extolling Italian here, but note that for those three sounds it uses the digraphs gl, gn, and gi.
But it's still a million times better than English.