English is indeed a crap shoot, but it's not entirely fair to put French in that bucket as well. Much as you describe for Polish, there is a highly consistent

English is indeed a crap shoot, but it's not entirely fair to put French in that bucket as well. Much as you describe for Polish, there is a highly consistent set of writing-to-sound rules for French that you can learn quickly. French's downfall is in the other direction: with multiple ways to write some phonemes and many contexts where letters are silent, hearing a word, even perfectly, is not nearly enough to know with any certainty how to spell it. But reading French out loud? Anybody with a week or two of practice should definitely be able to know how to pronounce well over 95% of what they read, even if they don't know what they're saying.