As an antidote to this, I recommend Mark Rosenfelder’s <i>Hou tu pranownse Inglish</i> [<a href="http://www.zompist.com/spell.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zompist.com/spell.html</a>], which gives a set of rules to correctly predict the pronunciation of English words from their spelling ‘over 85% of the time’ (using a sample lexicon of 5000 words). English spelling is certainly horrible and irregular, but it isn’t <i>unmanageably</i> irregular.<p>(To illustrate the point, I supply a quote from said article of a fact which seems to be ignored curiously often: ‘George Bernard Shaw's <i>ghoti</i> … illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, <i>ghoti</i> can only be pronounced like <i>goatee</i>.)