English spelling is difficult even for native English speakers. It's awful. Worse yet, some words are spelled differently British and U.S. English. In the late 1700s, in the U.S. Noah Webster wrote a series of schoolbooks and dictionaries that became standards. Noah Webster wanted to improve English spelling by making it more phonetic. He did a bad job. He only went halfway. He didn't succeed in making it simpler, he only succeeded in making it different. There have been proposals to make English spelling phonetic, notably by the (wonderful!) playwright George Bernard Shaw. None of them have gotten anywhere. I don't think it will ever happen. I think it is less likely to happen than calendar reform, or the universal adoption of Esperanto.