English is context-sensitive phonetic, Spanish and other Latin languages are regular phonetic. Just look at "are"; its pronunciation of "a" depends on a following consonant and following vowel. Otherwise the "a" would be pronounced like "add". There are over a dozen context-sensitive rules like that, and thousands of common words that are purely exceptions, e.g. "read" and "learning" having different pronunciations of "ea", and hence are not phonetic. They are whole-word pronunciations learned by rote or immersion.