Well, French isn't that easy. If you see something written, you generally know how to pronounce it, but the same isn't true in reverse. There are many silent endings to words, and even some native speakers of French make mistakes with spelling the ends of their words. As for English, yes, there are some rules, but there are also many many exceptions. English contains a whole mixture of words from many different sources. And unlike most other languages, our spelling has never been standardised, so there isn't a one-to-one relationship between how it looks and how it sounds.

There are rules but there are probably just as many exceptions to the rule. For example: though through cough rough plough ought borough Reading these words out aloud, you can hear that "-ough" is pronounced differently in each case (7 ways to pronounch -ough!). So I reckon the best thing to do is to learn how to pronounce new words when you learn them..no point learning the rules ! So maybe it's a bit like Chinese...the character sometimes gives you clues about the pronunciation..but there are exceptions and loopholes!

Yes. There are also phonology in English such as /t/ and /d/ elision between consonants, glottal stop in AmE, and assimilation in rapid speech. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/progs/prog3.shtml

As a native speaker of English, I say don't bother with rules. They are not reliable enough to be useful. There is no rule that will cover the pronunciations of "increment," "implement," and "inclement," for example. I apologize on behalf of my native language. It's awful, even for native speakers, but I don't think it's ever going to change. There have been proposals to phoneticize English but they've never gotten any traction. In the 1950s, there was and I believe still is an ongoing debate about how to teach reading to young children. Most schools take the pragmatic approach and use a mixture. One method is "sight-reading," which means that children are simply shown the word as a whole, and learn to grasp it as if the entire word were a single symbol. The other is "phonics," but in my school you were taught to use that only when you got stuck. "Sound it out!" the teacher would say. You didn't expect sounding it out to get you the right pronunciation, you just hoped it would remind you. In other words, native speakers learn English spelling and pronunciation almost as if the words were ideograms.

Yes. But many people have accents and we understand; british, boston, southern,