One issue with this: "phonetic" spelling is different between different accents. For example -

Rhoticity: US Americans would spell "colour" something like "kuler" (or kʌlər in IPA) and Australians would spell it "kula". "Park" would remain "park" in the US, and be "pahk" in Australia.

Yod dropping: "Duty" would stay "duty" in the US (or maybe "dooty") and become "dyuty" (or "dyooty") in Australia.

/eə/ to /er/: "Fairy" and "ferry" are pronunced the same in American English and would presumably be spelt the same phonetically. They're pronounced differently from each other in Australia.

Salary–celery merger: In the state of Victoria in particular, some "e"s become "a"s, so "celery" is pronounced the same as "salary". "Helicopter" becomes "halicopter". The name "Ellie" becomes "Allie"

Then there are disaster words like "Melbourne" which have a combination of these things: Americans would might spell it something like "Melborne" while Melbournians would spell it "Malbn" or "Malben".

It's a bit like how some linguists have written journal articles entirely in IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) - apparently you can hear their accents in their work lol.

We would almost definitely have to add letters. English actually has 14 vowel sounds (eg. long "a" vs. short "a"), but right now we're trying to represent them through 5 letters. Same story for many consonants: we'd need to distinguish between the two types of "th" sounds ("thorn" vs. "that") and the two types of "g" sounds ("big" vs "barge").

So while I don't mind the principle of spelling English phonetically, it faces a lot more technical issues than we might think at first glance. Even putting aside that, the implementation barriers would be enormous, considering that English is now pretty much the global lingua franca (billions of native and non-native speakers having to learn the new way, signage replaced, new keyboards if we add letters, etc etc). It's really the technical issues that make it unviable though.

That said, I'm not against some simplication of English (but still ain't sure it's worth it)

Interesting question, thank you!

Ohh

When I asked this, I was mainly referring to the American phonetic spelling. But I see your point, tho. What got me interested in this idea was when I discovered that the English Alphabet actually use to have extra letters that we don't use anymore. Link: link

And then I notice how we actually kinda still use them, in a way. Some of these older letters are used in phonetic spelling, and I thought that was pretty neat. So, I thought maybe using the phonetic spelling would be easier. Because there are a lot of English words that have silent letters, and that's always bugged me.

For example:

"Love" has a silent "e". But why tho? If the "e" isn't going to be pronounced, why have it there to begin with? It always seemed stupid. And then we have words that have letters that make more than 1 sound and also multiple letters that make the same sound.. Like..

"Cool" and "Nice"

The "C" in "cool" makes a "cuh" sound, but the "C" in "nice" is "ssss". I don't get that. And then there's the fact that the letters "C" and "K" both make "cuh". But "C" also makes 2 sounds, and one of the sounds is also made by "S". Doesn't that make English more confusing? Wouldn't it make more since to have just one letter per sound? A lot like in Japanese, each character makes a single sound. That just seems easier to me.