there should be a word for the feeling of when you can sense the top comment of a post before you open it

You have to remember that most English speaking countries don't have a spelling bee either. The US is weird.

I looked up a UK version and all I could find was old competitions about learning to spell in other languages. E.g. https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/events/national-spelling-bee-competition

In french we have "concours d'orthographe". Pronunciation is pretty consistent, but we add a dozen letters for every sound we utter, so spelling's still a mess.

Spanish seems to be doing okay

yes but no one gets taught to drink IPAs in school, you do that at university

I remember being in second grade and being taught all sorts of rules about pronunciation and then a few minutes later, be given edge cases.

It was the moment when I gave up saying things correctly. Herb with a hard H, phone with a hard P. City with a k noise. English is stupid.

I treat English spelling like Chinese characters. How you pronounce is at best a hint on how to write.

Always has been.

balkan ones: serbian croatian, slovenian, ...

you read as you write, no bogus letters(and sounds)

Spanish. I have a meme about it, I'll post it in the coming days

Korean. It has exceptions, but not weird exceptions, and* they follow consistent rules.

Aren't most languages a mix of several languages?
Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words...

Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.

English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it's quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it's contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.

The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.

For example German imported the word 'cakes', but it is now spelled 'Keks' inline with it's pronunciation.

I think it's funny how the slang word 'biz' fixes the spelling of 'business'

Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don't seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written "chrome" as "krohm" or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with "ch". It's actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.

And the french silent letters are pretty consistent