But I think this is the way languages have to work if they're supposed to be spoken by non-native speakers or just spoken by a large number of geographically di

But I think this is the way languages have to work if they're supposed to be spoken by non-native speakers or just spoken by a large number of geographically dispersed people. Even German is losing a lot of its initial complexity because of the last decades of immigration. This is mostly just in spoken German for now, but the written word will eventually follow. And all languages with wide geographic dispersion have a disconnect between the spoken word and the written spelling, the most extreme example being Chinese.