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This is a precis of an article in the Daily Telegraph found here

Masha Bell, author and literacy researcher, has claimed that a high number of 'inconsistencies' in the way basic words are spelt makes it much harder for children to read and write at a young age. She has argued that sweeping reforms, mainly in the form of standardisation, are needed to the spelling system to improve children's linguistic abilities.

This is, of course, nothing new. Many Societies, like the Spelling Society founded in 1908, have been campaigning to overhaul the spelling rules in English and introduce a simpler, phonetically-based structure. A short list of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling starts with children being taught the alphabet and finding that it is a poor guide on how to reliably pronounce the written form or reproducing spoken words in writing. ESOL (English as a Second or Other Language) learners, grappling with the idiosyncracies of learning a new language, most common complaint is that if words, and common everyday words at that, weren't soo hard to spell their rate of language acquisition would be accelerated.

She argues that English employs 185 'unreliable' spellings for just 44 speech sounds. Words such as too, true, who, flew, shoe and you all employ different letters to represent the same sound. According to academics, children in Britain normally take three years to read to a decent standard. But in Finland - where words are more likely to be pronounced as they look - children can read fluently within three months. Similar findings in languages which are practically phonetic (with few exceptions) like Italian, Spanish and many Eastern, non-pictogrammic (i.e. a pictogram is a symbol that represents an idea or concept and thus spelling, in the general sense, is irrelevant) languages add weight to the concern that something maybe has to be done.

English is undoubtedly one of the richest, if not the richest, languages in the world. But this, historically, has turned out to become a double-edged sword. We have borrowed so many words from so many other languages, and the very foundation of the English language has several roots, that in the evolution of English it is not surprising that variations and inconsistencies in how many of these introduced words are going to be 'Anglicised' are going to arise.