there should be a word for the feeling of when you can sense the top comment of a post before you open it

In french we have "concours d'orthographe". Pronunciation is pretty consistent, but we add a dozen letters for every sound we utter, so spelling's still a mess.

You have to remember that most English speaking countries don't have a spelling bee either. The US is weird.

I looked up a UK version and all I could find was old competitions about learning to spell in other languages. E.g. https://www.routesintolanguages.ac.uk/events/national-spelling-bee-competition

There are some other languages that have inconsistent spelling, but most do have some level of consistency yeah, also would character tests in Chinese/Japanese be considered similar to spelling bees?

yes but no one gets taught to drink IPAs in school, you do that at university

Yup, it usually has a pronunciation guide with IPA rules or whatever.

Aren't most languages a mix of several languages?
Like in German many words come from French or sometimes also from English words.
Only the Germans often butcher them, that they speak it as if they were real German words...

Third, a lot of the reason we have spellings that don't seem phonetic is that early English scribes spelled things as they were (or similar to the original) in the source language, as a way of preserving history. For example, they could have written "chrome" as "krohm" or something but they opted to indicate the word came from Greek, with "ch". It's actually kind of a beautiful idea imo, trying to leave hints of heritage in the spelling. But yes I realize not everyone will care about that and will look at spelling as a utilitarian function alone.

The same is true for languages with better spelling systems.

For example German imported the word 'cakes', but it is now spelled 'Keks' inline with it's pronunciation.

I think it's funny how the slang word 'biz' fixes the spelling of 'business'

English is descriptive, not proscriptive.

Surely there are no languages that base their rules on forbidding certain pronunciations?

(Proscriptive means forbidding; I assume you meant prescriptive)

Congratulations, you have described virtually every language on this planet.

I just learnt about the existence of "spelling bee competitions" through this post. But in English it makes sense that this exists.

Always has been.

I remember being in second grade and being taught all sorts of rules about pronunciation and then a few minutes later, be given edge cases.

It was the moment when I gave up saying things correctly. Herb with a hard H, phone with a hard P. City with a k noise. English is stupid.

I treat English spelling like Chinese characters. How you pronounce is at best a hint on how to write.

And the french silent letters are pretty consistent

I, for one, love my Ghoughphtheightteeaus with some ghoti 🥔🐟

And why is "kn" even a thing in English?

Knowledge? Knight? Knee? Knapsack? Knitting?

How does that make any sense at all?

Edit" and then there's Gnome! Why isn't it Knome? Or Gnowledge?

I'm there. I asked how to pronounce a word from a newspaper once, and was told,"like it's written...?"

too often it's some proprietary phonetic spelling which barely makes sense even in the target dialect. yet they have the audacity to use square brackets for it.

Worcestershire (noun)

[ wurs - teir - sheh ]

go ahead, make a spelling system which works in all dialects.

Playing Rule Britannia (bass boosted) over voice chat when you declare war on your friends with a huge navy in Civ is great