> This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries! Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having tro

> This should get drilled into all school children in English speaking countries! Yes I totally agree, my daughter who grew up speaking English, was having trouble reading some Japanese words that were transliterated (Romanji) because she couldn't figure out how to pronounce the vowels, but for me (I'm Italian) it was easy to read them correctly, even though I had never seen those words before and I didn't know what they meant. > This is mostly true for every language that uses the Roman alphabet Yes and surprisingly it works fairly well even with some non-European languages where the Latin alphabet was adopted, such as Malaysian and Indonesian. However there are some languages that have frequent exceptions, e.g. French comes to mind where there are several word endings like e.g. "-eau", "-aux" and "-aix" etc., other languages also have exceptions like "-de" endings in Portuguese and some diphthongs in German like "ie", "au" etc. PS. it's strange that the Great Vowel Shift is not widely known among English speakers - it caused the English language to have highly irregular phonetics which is one of the most evident features of the language.