When I started learning English, I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce most written words. I just checked and it would have held true for 13/16 words in th

When I started learning English, I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce most written words. I just checked and it would have held true for 13/16 words in the above sentence. From spoken English into writing it is also true. It took me years to accept that the word "know" has k-letter in the beginning. That is significantly worse than Swedish, if you guess the "en" gender, you are correct more than 50% of the time. And the language stays pretty much understandable with wrong genders. That might not be true with English. My native Finnish is more structurally complex than either of those. But I think it has fewer exceptions. Terribly hard to tell when it's bit too fluent.