The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.
Blame that on Latin, which had only five vowels (not counting the long and short vowels separately).
Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.
Just today the NYT Strands puzzle gave a great example: you can find one set of prefixes that make each of the following rhyme, and a different set of prefixes that make them all sound different:
-ooze -oose -ews -ues -use -oes -uise
You can do this purely with prefixes ending in consonants, i.e. not by turning -use into -ouse, for example.
(spoilers for the little -ooze puzzle: for rhymes, booze choose brews blues ruse shoes cruise; for non-rhymes, snooze loose pews plagues obtuse toes guise; many others are possible, and rhyming or lack thereof may depend on accent).