Beaucoup is 'boku', not 'buku'. And having groups of letters be pronounced as a single sound is not the opposite of being phonetical, as long as the groups are used consistently (e.g. -eau- is always pronounced 'o', -ou- is always pronounced 'u', final consonants are never pronounced etc.) .

Granted, the sibling comment lists quite a few exceptions to these rules, but it is still quite a regular language.

The system of silent consonants is quite useful in keeping the language have somewhat regular declensions/conjugations. If they were not preserved, it would seem that French conjugations are mad, inventing consonants out of thin air. For example, coup/coupee, meaning to cut/ cut (up), are pronounced ku/kupe. This would make it seem like the participle is adding -pe to the infinitive (and it would add -te or -ze or many others), when in fact the participle is almost always adding -e, which forces the consonant in the root to be pronounced, since French really hates hiatuses.

If anything, French phonetics are the real problem, aggressively dropping consonants of the end of words, but loathing hiatuses, sometimes even between words in literary contexts (where sometimes a 't' or 'z' sound is added between a word ending in a vowel and the next word beginning with a vowel, 'la liaison').

French is fairly predictable, there are pronunciation rules. On the other hand you have English where you have things like "weird", "weight", "heir" and "receipt", "recipe" and say "sniper", this uncertainty around "data", "direct", "neither" etc, and as a pragmatic rule there are no pronunciation rules really, you have to learn the language twice.

If your native language has sane spelling correspondences this feature of English never ceases to amaze and to be honest baffle, even bother you.

Will this vowel in this particular word be the diphthong you'd expect according to the patterns you've inferred up to this point or some wild monophtong just because? Let's find out!

As for the French, good for them, they speak a world language that is also one of the three working languages of the EU. My native language is another world language. English is a lingua franca nowadays, but there's no methaphysical necessity about speaking English, it's just popular enough and therefore convenient.

I think you're confusing things. A difference between the number of written characters and the number of phonemes doesn't make a language "non-phonetic" if you mean consistency between spelling and pronunciation.

What matters is that a sequence of symbols _consistently_ matches a phoneme. For example, you'll find that the "u" phoneme is often written as "ou" in French. Same thing for the "o" sound and "eau" (you misspelt "beaucoup").

What I would consider "non-phonetic" is the set "though", "through", "thorough", and "thought" in English, where "ough" has four different sounds.