>>Actually, that's the advantage of almost any language I know of, except English. French, from what I heard, works one way - you know how to pronounce it, but several ways to write the same thing.
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>Not really any language. French works reasonably well - one way
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>The advantage of Spanish is that there's a rule that tells you which syllabe has the emphasis in a word. If anything does not follow the rule an accent is put on the vowel of the syllabe that has the emphasis.
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>Also, Spanish has no 'long' or 'short' vowels - like the o in monitor and open
And such simple rules for reading exist for many other languages. Macedonian, for example, the accent is always on the third-to-last syllable (ma-ke-DO-ni-ya, ma-KE-don-ci), or the first in short words; the alphabet is phonetic. So, anyone can learn to read Macedonian in about one day. Same for Russin languages (a minority from my area, related to Ukrainians, I suppose) - except it's the penultimate syllable. Hungarian - the only thing you can spell two ways are the final -cs vs -ts vs -cz (all read as -ch) or -i vs -y in older last names (notably the nobility). Everything else is 1:1 between spelling and phonemes and, guess what, the accent is always on the first syllable.
German, Portuguese, Italian, any Slavic language, Spanish, and probably any Scandinavian or Baltic language should also have very simple rules for relation between written text and its pronunciation. It's only French (one way trouble) and English (total chaos).
And, of course, the languages with semantic, not phono-whatever script, like Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese (pre-colonial) are on a completely different picture.