I'm Polish myself and hit a hard wall with phrasals when I moved over to Ireland 13 years ago. I still keep discovering new ones every now and then despite living here for over a decade.

That's the only way to learn the quirks and idioms of any language really.

I personally have problems with the double L , I never know when to use 1 or 2, like in until and still , I always guess wrong and have to use spell check to fix the problem. Similar for other inconsistent usage of double letters.

If you write how you speak I will not be able read what you write and vice versa. English has a wide range of dialects, nare you going to try to impose on on the rest of us. Someone like me used to broad West Country speech would spell rather differently than a Glaswegian for instance. Should we have diacritics to indicate stress? If so will you choose the common US (stress the ultimate syllable) or British practice (stress the ante-penultimate syllable)? In British English, the name Bernard is pronounced with the final vowel as an unstressed, almost elided, obscure vowel; but it is a stressed long a in US English.

I often see people demanding that English be written phonetically. Many of those people seem to be unaware that their own languages also have dialects and that they would be equally unable to write phonetically in a way that would satisfy all users of that language.

There have been numerous attempts at consistent auxiliary languages. None have become very popular. The only 'widely' used auxiliary is Esperanto and that has already shown itself to be subject to all the same evolutionary forces that drive changes in natural languages; people must invent new words and then they disagree about how to spell them, how to use them, what gender they must have; slang is created and eventually becomes normalized in some communities but not in others, etc.

Spanish is largely written as it's spoken. Even with its many accents and dialects, holding a spelling bee would be ridiculous because of how easy it is to deduct writing from pronunciation.

That being said, if it was reformed to the point where it absolutely was written as spoken, it would become very ugly.

So if you can get objective and think about 150-300 years in the future , do you think there will be no changes to cleanup things in the language ?

You can change it and clean it up all you like but that won't stop its evolution and a hundred years later the spelling and pronunciation will be out of sync again.

I don't mean that we should necessarily avoid reform but what you get when you do a serious reform is a new language that is different from all the dialects and it must either be imposed from above or be in some way sufficiently attractive for people to adopt it. And then you have another dialect.

See also the xkcd joke on standards, I think it applies here too: https://xkcd.com/927/

I guess what I'm saying is maybe they should take a swing at making something similar to esperanto, but with a focus on making it as understandable by an english speaker as possible.

I don't think you can generalize the US pronunciation this way. Source: This was my grandfather's name.

The point is that there are many ways to pronounce the same word even within one country.

If you don't get all the countries with an official interest in the language to agree to the change in sync, you're going to create a mess for proficient speakers and an even worse mess for learners by increasing the volume of spelling you have to learn. And even if it does work out, you're still going to create a mess for learners - especially the ones who don't have enough money to replace all their materials all at once - by creating an orthographic horizon.

I've also got my doubts about whether the end goal is even possible. 100 years ago, there was an effort in the UK to try and come up with a new native English alphabet in order to try and address this same problem. One of the reasons it failed was that, even within one country, the language's pronunciation wasn't regular enough to come up with a spelling system that's phonetic for all speakers. Since then, the gamut of pronunciation that can be considered official has only widened, meaning the possibility of creating a truly phonetic writing system for English has only become more remote.

Since it would be taught everywhere, people might start using it as lingua franca. It would certainly be better than Esperanto, which is not better than other natural languages despite being artificial.

The Romance languages for example have pretty clear spelling rules. It's not 1 letter : 1 sound, but usually 1 group of letters : 1 group of sounds, such as "ll" in Spanish or "ill" in French or "ch" in Italian&Romanian. There are usually exceptions around loanwords and old names, and sometimes different sounds that native speakers don't realize they pronounce differently (e.g. in Romanian a final 'i' in a word is usually a semi-vowel, while 'i' in the middle of a word is a full vowel, but most Romanians you ask would tell you that it's the same sound, even if they pronounce and hear it differently ).

I personally feel stress is an ambiguous term for the concept, for English atleast it is more about the duration of a sound, rather than the intensity of it.

I don't know Indian languages, but this can be subjective. A Mexican friend once told me that Spanish is easy because you pronounce it the way you write it... What he did not tell is that LL, J, H, B/V are all pronounced different in his language.

"/b, d, ɡ, ʝ/ are pronounced as fricatives or approximants [β, ð, ɣ, ʝ] in all places except after a pause, /n/, or /m/, or, in the case of /d/ and /ʝ/, after /l/. In the latter environments, they are stops [b, d, ɡ, ɟʝ] like English b, d, g, j but are fully voiced in all positions, unlike in English. When it is distinct from /ʝ/, /ʎ/ is realized as an approximant [ʎ] in all positions"

Although the rules may be easy for native speakers who grasp them intuitively, they can be a lot more complex for speakers of other languages, who are used to different "easy" rules.

After learning French and Spanish (wow there is such a thing as a subjunctive tense?) I started to understand how ridiculous English is, but this? wow.

You can have subjunctive in the past as well as in the future.

All languages are ridiculous to varying degrees. Why do tables have gender? Why do the French continue to write final t's and s's when they stopped pronouncing them two centuries ago? Why must adjectives agree with their nouns? Why do many languages not have any way of easily referring to someone without mentioning their sex. Why do declensions exist when auxiliary words can perform the same functions?

Only English surnames need to be spelled when pronounced or pronounced when in written form because you can't possibly know how to pronounce them by just reading them (and don't blame this on immigration)