I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis.
On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.
Then I started to see we are doing the same in Spanish with business/internet to make things sound cooler.
For phonemic spelling systems, it wouldn't even be hard. Start with the baseline of aeiou for the basic vowel triangle. Then let's say that umlaut changes the vowel's "default" backness without changing roundness, ogonek lowers the vowel, tilde makes it nasal, and breve makes it a glide. This gives us aąäãăeęëẽĕiįïĩĭoǫöõŏuųüũŭ, plus all combinations of these diacritics when needed (which should be very rare). Add doubling to indicate vowel length, and I can't think of any European language that cannot be consistently expressed this way; American English should only need aąäeëiįouų.
There's a lot of sound variation in regional dialects of Spanish, from country to country and even regions within a country. People pronounce vowels and consonants differently, and even the "accent" varies a lot (some people can seem as if they were "singing" instead of speaking, to speakers of other countries/regions).
Portuguese has the same basic characters except for ç, in the case of vowels it's resolved with combinations of letters or by adding accents. For instance e and é have different sounds and ou isn't the same sound as o followed by u.
Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.
I have lived in Ireland for more than a year and I haven't heard anyone arguing in a really expressive way although I've seen a couple actual fights starting a couple times. I don't know, anger in English always feels like diet coke to me.
I'm curious about this. I mean, English doesn't even have different words for singular/plural "you".
It's a cognate of the German du, Latin and French tu, Slovak and Czech ty and others.
Some languages do fine without plurals at all.
The ambiguity in you isn't just between plural and singular, but between a rhetorical you and actual.
You should eat your vegetables. Who, me in particular? Or everyone?
Joe flew yesterday to Paris, he had never flown before, so he was nervous.
Pretty much every speaker no matter where from will use the same tenses here, past simple for recent past and perfect for older past. We have similar rules in Spanish and I'm pretty sure that another person from my region would use the same tenses as I would. But I'm not quite sure if someone from, say Costa Rica or El Salvador would pick the same tenses. In fact, I don't know if someone 500km south or west would use the same tenses. This is usually not a problem because usually you don't need that much correctness, but in engineering it can be a problem.
Because English verb tenses are so simple they are used in a way more consistent way and from Australia will use the verbs in a very similar way as a Brit, and even non native speakers can use them in a pretty correct way.
Another problem is that in Spanish verbs give you a lot more context and people rely on them, but again they are used differently across regions. In Englosh because they give so little context means that you're forced to add a lot more context in the rest of the sentence in a much more explicit way.
Yet another problem is that verbs in Spanish are super complex for non natives, and because we rely on the verb so much they may end up saying something that they don't mean. Also this is usually not a problem in casual conversations but in technical conversations it may be an issue.
Finally, English handles certainty well. It's very easy to tell how certain you are, if something is mandatory or not, how likely is something, etc. I can't explain why, maybe it's because I've read countless RFCs and not many specifications in Spanish, but this is a general feeling that I have even though I cannot give you an exact reason but I think it would be easier to translate a specification from Spanish to English than the other way around. Even if I find more often things that translate poorly from Spanish to English than the other way around.