English is phonetic, it just borrows its pronunciation rules from many differing (and sometimes directly opposed) other languages.
Then there’s a percentage where they’re just direct borrowings from other languages and you need to have an idea of how that language pronounces words (especially French), so really only 10-15% or so of English words end up being true exceptions.
To do this you need to know 56(!) rules.
I think this actually demonstrates how complex English pronunciation actually is.
As a non native speaker of English, and a native speaker of a phonetic language, I strongly object to the notion that it's easy to guess English word pronunciation by just reading it.
https://jochenenglish.de/misc/dearest_creature.pdf
The joy of English pronunciation
George Nolst Trenit´e (1870–1946)
1 The text
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain
(Mind the latter how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say—said, pay—paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
1
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
Missiles, similes, reviles.
... (7 pages of pain follow) ...
and the the Oxford and US pronunciation (at the time, it has changed since) in phonetic.
And to the latter point I got that all the time in Japan, but I think main reasons are: they wanna practice, but even more they wanna practice with a native English speaker bc it's a novel experience for em!
There's a simple and consistent way to compare languages in this way too, too: train a neural net to map spelling to pronunciation on one half of the dictionary, then test it on the other half. The more complicated and less consistent the orthography is, the more mistakes it'll make. People have in fact done this exact experiment, and English scores extremely poorly in it; for spelling, closer to Chinese, in fact, than many other European languages: https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
Does a language stop being phonetic when you have to include other information provided by the rest of the word? I'm not a linguist by any means, but "ough" being pronounced a couple different ways depending how it's used doesn't seem like it'd preclude the language from being considered phonetic in general.
English, on the other hand, has silent letters, inconsistent mappings even within the same word, exceptions, irregularities, and sounds that are represented by multiple letters and spellings.
English is not a phonetic language except in the sense that it does have mappings between sounds and characters, which would make sense if one were to compare it to a wholly written language like Python, but not any human language.