> But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where

> But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. I don't know about Polish, but I have had conversations where native speakers think that until exceptions are pointed out, because they are unaware. There's also the issue of accents, where we expect spelling to be universal across the language, but pronunciation in some accents have drifted (ie. it's not a straightforward mapping).