I think nearly all English words are spelled phonetically - in the language they're borrowed from. French, ...

One of the most common complaints about French is the inability to spell a word having heard it pronounced correctly. (Pronouncing a written word is considerably easier, though not foolproof.)

In English we have "though" and "trough" where the "gh" is inconsistent. Can you give me a similar example from French. I'm not saying there isn't one but I did try to think of one before posting the reply above and couldn't (mais ma Francais n'est pas trop chaud :).

I think Italian and Spanish have simpler pronunciation rules with less (no?) dependency on position within a word but I think French might still be conistent. update:"ville" and "gentille" ("veel" vs "jontiya") are an example but the fact that nobody else has posted an example makes me think that examples in French are exceedingly rare.

The English words were spelled phonetically at the time the spellings were determined. That is to say, those silent 'e's at the end of a word were pronounced; and a word like "knight" was actually spoken with a k-sound, the gh as a guttural sound. The spoken language changed but the printed remained relatively stable, so now our words have some incredibly strange spellings. Think cough, hiccough, plough, though, tough, through. I'd hate to have to learn English as an adult...

Update: corrected minor spelling error.