When I started learning English, I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce most written words.<p>I just checked and it would have held true for 13&#x2F;16 words in the above sentence. From spoken English into writing it is also true. It took me years to accept that the word &quot;know&quot; has k-letter in the beginning.<p>That is significantly worse than Swedish, if you guess the &quot;en&quot; gender, you are correct more than 50% of the time. And the language stays pretty much understandable with wrong genders. That might not be true with English.<p>My native Finnish is more structurally complex than either of those. But I think it has fewer exceptions. Terribly hard to tell when it&#x27;s bit too fluent.