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"The pronunciation<->spelling rules are completely inconsistent"

Those rules are situational. Example:
"Whose car is this?" "Who's going with you?"

"They're going to the store." "Hey, over there!" "Their car got towed."

Spelling is a speedbump, not a hurdle. There are plenty of native English speakers on FR who get their spelling and grammar wrong, but still get their point across.

"... but still get their point across."

I've bragged on this once before, but - My 7-year old had to write in Sunday School something that was good that happened to her. She was proud of her spelling test on Friday and wrote "I speld dinosaur rite".

Spelling is a speedbump, not a hurdle. There are plenty of native English speakers on FR who get their spelling and grammar wrong, but still get their point across.

Amen to that. Furthermore, one does not even have to be able to spell in order to learn a language. Two years olds start to put it all together amazingly well without being able to read. Immersion is the way we all learn our first language.

I had a co-worker from Brazil whose wife wanted to learn to speak English because when he had guests visit him from the States she felt like she was missing out on something. So she found an instructor. The instuctor was Russian, and spoke absolutely no Portuguese. She, of course, spoke Portuguese and Spanish, but did not know any Russian. They did not have any common language between them. Within 6 months, she was highly conversational in English. It was amazing.