in many languages theres clear rules how to pronounce vowels, consonants and combination of such. in english there's no rules at all. sure there will be always exceptions and oddballs to the rules in other languages but usually you see a word and just by looking at it you know how to pronounce it, but thats not the case in english. not hating on english, its super simple and straight forward in a lot of aspects but the pronunciation clusterfuck is at a stark contrast to being otherwise one of the easiest languages to learn.