When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predi

When learning German it was a revelation that languages could pronounce the same letters in the same way in every word, and therefore you could accurately predict the pronunciation of a word from the spelling. English does not do this; every word has its own pronunciation, only loosely related to how it is spelled. I think every native English speaker has had the experience of learning a word from reading it, and subsequently mis-pronouncing it because we had to guess at the pronunciation. E.g. I suffered acute embarrassment from mis-pronouncing "Hermione" when talking to a friend about the Potter books. I grew up in the UK but had never met the name before and my guess at pronunciation was entirely reasonable but entirely wrong. Though I lived for a while in Ireland, and they have it worse. My friend Mebd laughed at me a lot.