Sure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sound

Sure, but here Spanish orthography is actually representative of the sound, whereas English orthography is a mess (plus English has more than 5 base vowel sounds to begin with). No matter how you cut it, English's vowel phonology is much more complicated than Spanish or Japanese. One misconception that native English speakers have is they think their language is simple to pronounce, when it really isn't.