/nIn , Wolf K
wrote:

Oh, but we do pronounce words the way they're spelled. Trouble is,
English uses a mish-mash of spelling rules.

You bring up a point which is that all words are pronounced correctly,
where the pronunciation rules are what changes.

But I find that statement hard to comprehend given the pronunciation of
born/borne, read/read, lead/led, mischivous/mischevious, etc.

The result: English maps all
speech sounds except one onto two or more spellings, and the vast
majority of spellings map onto two or more speech sounds.

Wow. In good faith, this sounds like you know what you're talking about, so
I believe you, but I really did not comprehend that sentence, even after
reading it a few times.

Perhaps an anecdotal example is required for me to understand.
Do others understand that seemingly all-inclusive single-sentence summary?

In addition,
the sound mapped by any one spelling may depend on the meaning of the
word, or the spelling of the following sound, etc. Plus different
spellings in for the same word in different varieties of English, and
borrowed words are hardly ever changed to English spelling.

I'm not sure I comprehended all that you said, but I did gather that words
like Nevada & Arkansas & New Orleans are each pronounced differently
depending mostly on whether you live there or you don't.

I'm glad your method teaching yourself better spelling is working out
for you.

Thanks for the encouragement. It gets me angry that I misspell the same
words time and again.

I think it's because the right-click squiggle-correction method is too
easy.

However, any method I add to that has to, by design, be almost as easy
because otherwise, I'll just right-click squiggle correct and be done with
it.