I wouldn't put English and French in the same category of phoneticism. English is all over the place[1], French pronunciation is fairly systematic.
[1] Not that that's in any way surprising, considering its messy Saxon-Norman-Viking-... history.
[1] Not that that's in any way surprising, considering its messy Saxon-Norman-Viking-... history.
(FWIW I speak English to a level that native speakers can't tell it's not my first language unless I trip over words I only know from reading - People ask me, "so where in England are you from" all the time. My French is just about passable - I can get by for basic everyday conversations as long as the other person doesn't speak too fast and they don't mind explaining/rephrasing the occasional sentence. I'd agree that perfecting your French is a lot harder than perfecting your English despite what I've said above.)
Writing in French is difficult to learn because there are many more verb conjugations and tenses, and nouns have often seemingly arbitrary sexes. The silent consonants are fairly consistent and systematic.
Ideally, yes, in the sense that if you were to create an artificial language, you would strive for that (at the beginning at least).
In practice, the speech->text direction isn't nearly as important as text->speech when learning a second language. If you aren't immersed in the environment of the target language, you have to rely on texts in order to acquire vocabulary. And a messy script like English makes that very hard (although not as hard as Japanese). I've been learning English for years and can pass an English proficiency test with a perfect score, but I still make basic mistakes in pronunciation.
Saxon, French, Latin and Greek words are all readily identifiable by their spelling, unlike say, German or Italian where most spellings have been naturalized.
(Two Ls make a Y sound in French. And Spanish, for that matter.)