I speak French and Portuguese, both as native languages. I wouldn't characterize any language as broken, but what most people seem to be describing here is the

I speak French and Portuguese, both as native languages. I wouldn't characterize any language as broken, but what most people seem to be describing here is the divergence between the spelling and the pronunciation, as well as the amount of redundant spelling. In this regard, French is unquestionably worse than Portuguese. Basically, French and English follow the same orthography "school", which is the etymological one. The idea that spelling reforms should be few and far in between and that the way specific words are spelt has to do with how they were either spelt or pronounced in other, older languages. This makes it so that they're both to a great extent languages whose writing system feels ad hoc. Languages such as Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, are such that if one gets taught the sound of each letter one can start accurately sounding out words immediately. Portuguese does not follow the etymological school, instead adopting a more phonological spelling. It has, however, a far from 1:1 phoneme to grapheme ratio, and more complex rules governing how to pronounce words. Perfectly regular complex rules, though.