...give 'em this little beauty to read! I think I may be missing part of it, given that the last line ends with a comma (that may also be a typo...I got it from a link someone posted on Facebook), but it gets the point across regardless!

Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear,
So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say said, pay-paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say break, steak, but bleak and streak.
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via,
Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir,
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery:
Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles.
Exiles, similes, reviles.
Wholly, holly, signal, signing.
Thames, examining, combining
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war, and far.
From “desire”: desirable–admirable from “admire.”
Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier.
Chatham, brougham, renown, but known.
Knowledge, done, but gone and tone,
One, anemone. Balmoral.
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel,
Gertrude, German, wind, and mind.
Scene, Melpomene, mankind,
Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
Reading, reading, heathen, heather.
This phonetic labyrinth
Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet;
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Banquet is not nearly parquet,
Which is said to rime with “darky.”
Viscous, Viscount, load, and broad.
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s O.K.,
When you say correctly: croquet.
Rounded, wounded, grieve, and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive, and live,
Liberty, library, heave, and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven,
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the difference, moreover,
Between mover, plover, Dover,

It's a long one: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Cool! Even granted that some of those pronunciations are regional (for example, in the U.S. we pronounce "Pall Mall" as "Paul Maul"...it's a brand of cigarettes here) it shows just how all over the place English pronunciation really is (I'm extremely grateful that I didn't have to learn English as a second language!).

Redwolf

Ah yes, one of the benefits of colonisation!!!

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I've done a page (in English) of lists of words with the same vowel sounds but which are spelled/spelt differently, starting from the idea that the sounds of numbers and certain keywords are readily recognisable. These are at the top of each list. - Sometimes to get them to practise, I make cubes that they spin or throw, with each face of the cube representing a particular sound - as I have done for a sound alphabet (of which I've made mention before). I think I've seen (on the net) that in Irish classrooms, they also have lists of words posted up in Irish so that children can get used to the way spelling functions in Irish and I think there are similar exercises in coursebooks as well. I don't know if they would call it phonics (synthetic or otherwise), but anyway it would perhaps be an nice idea if someone were to create some kind of a word game using similar sounds here on this forum. I've read somewhere that what's most important in Irish poetry is hearing words in the same line repeating the same sound - rather than rhyming couplets.
Is fearr an tsláinte ná an táinte.

Brilliant!

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

that text is full of words I've no idea how to pronounce them.
But French is also a language that is full of spelling and pronunciation oddities. Lucky the one who's a native speaker of both English and French ! Well, except if he learns Manx
Manx also belongs to the club of the languages whose spelling says nothing about the pronunciation

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

That's a bit of a bold statement. It's fairly systematic, as far as I can see, even if it's far from ideal.

But going back to the poem, I think the author stretched his credibility to make a point. He keeps contrasting the sounds of stressed syllables versus unstressed ones (a fairly systematic change), he keeps rhyming unstressed slack vowels with schwa (not correct). There's lots of things that don't belong there, not to mention the lack of proper meter in many places. He kind of undermines his point by getting it wrong....

_________________
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

it is not, the same letter or cluster of letter may be pronounced in several ways and you can't know in advance, you have to learn the pronunciation of every word by heart, just as in English or in French.
And there are many letters that aren't pronounced at all.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Lol. That's all I can say.

Basque, for instance, distinguishes /s̻/ and /s̺/, a contrast probably not apparent to the average IE language speaker.

Swedish has a phoneme /ɧ/ that is traditionally realized as [f͡x̟ʷ].

My own dialect of Alemannic German has a full series of affricates including /k͡x/ and a tenuis stop contrast based on tenseness.

And then there's Nuxálk, for which I will only quote this piece:

"xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓
[xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]
'He had had in his possession a bunchberry plant.'"

Of course, speakers of all these languages will find adapting to the ludicrous vowel system of English and its arcane secondary articulations very difficult, and for Irish, well, see the numerous complaints.

-> Anybody complaining about the pronunciation of anything is but revealing their unfamiliarity with other languages.

And as for orthography, well, they tend not to be designed with foreigners in mind. That's what we invented IPA for, after all.