This is an interesting article that helps explain the problems with English that I think make it unwieldy to learn to read. I favor the idea of improving the alphabet.

http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html

There are 26 alphabet letters that represent from 40 to 52 phonemes. 20 English phonemes have spellings that are predictable 90% of the time and 10 others are predictable over 80% of the time.

Segmenting words into sounds provides clues to their spelling most of the time. However, spelling in English also varies according to the position of the sound in a syllable, what sounds come before and after a given sound and the morphological structure of the word. Occasionally, a spelling will represent more than one word (read-read) so we have to use meaning as a clue to recognize the word.

Many letters in English are used as markers that signal the sounds of other letters. These letters have no direct relation to the sounds in the word. Doubled letters may be part of a spelling pattern and frequently represent only one phoneme.

There are five vowel letters and 15 vowel sounds in English. There are many different patterns used to spell these vowel sounds. There are 19 consonant phonemes that are sometimes spelled using more than one letter.

Dividing words into syllables is helpful in knowing how to pronounce and spell them. There are six different types of syllables: open, closed, vowel-consonant-e, etc. Syllabification often depend on word meaning and origins, so we must use such word parts such as prefixes and suffixes for correct division and spelling of syllables.