> Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words That sounds pretty bad actual

> Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words That sounds pretty bad actually. You're saying most _native_ speakers can't predict the pronunciation of 10-15% of common words? I wasn't great in Spanish at school, but the teacher was mostly correct that "you write it like it sounds". Much more so than English at least. (for context: I'm native Dutch/French, but speak mostly English, and know a bit of Spanish and Portuguese)