Definitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced

Definitely. One big pain point when learning English is phonetics, specifically the 12-15 vowels, and how frequently I fail predicting how a word is pronounced from the spelling. One has to be prepared to spend a lot of time learning _two_ language vocabularies: written and spoken. This is not true of most European languages (you can exactly know how a word is pronounced from the spelling).