It's not though. It's much more regular than english, but there are a lot of issues (which were addressed in the past).
Take for example the sentence "Ea ia ia". It's pronounced /ja ja ia/.
Some examples:
* x exists and it's not clear if it's pronounced /ks/ or /gz/.
* e is sometimes pronounced /je/
* h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this. E.g. hrană is [ˈxra.nə] even though people think they say [ˈhra.nə]
* i is the worst letter in Romanian. It has three pronunciations: /i/, /j/ and /ʲ/. Take for example "copiii". Is it pronounced /kopiji/, /kopiii/, /kopʲji/? Nope, it's /koˈpi.iʲ/ . In the past /j/ and /ʲ/ were written with ĭ making things a bit easier.
* Stress is not written which causes confusions between words like "muie" /mu'je/ (softened) and "muie" /'muje/ (blowjob)
* /ɨ/is written as both î and â based on some stupid rule to preserve România being writen as România instead of Romînia. This is to remind foreigners that we were once Romans, but it's pointless because most foreigners think Romania means "land of Roma (gypsy) people".
I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
> h is pronounced as /x/ sometimes and Romanians don't realize this.
Does the language actually have any minimal pairs where [h] vs [x] makes a difference? Most languages that have a velar fricative have a single phoneme that is either /x/ with [h] as an allophone in some contexts, or /h/ with [x] as an allophone in some contexts. There's no reason to reflect this in spelling if the distinction doesn't actually matter.
> I've heard that Serbian in Cyrillic is very phonetic though.
Serbo-Croatian in all its varieties is almost perfectly phonemic aside from pitch accent. Cyrillic vs Latin doesn't actually matter because even though Latin has more digraphs (lj for љ and nj for њ), they are unambiguous - there's no contrast between "lj" and "l" followed by "j", unlike say Russian where you need to distinguish between "лёд" and "льёт" somehow.
If you want no digraphs at all, Serbian and Montenegrin Cyrillic is still not ideal because "дз" is a digraph. Macedonian fixes it by using the historical Cyrillic "ѕ" [д]зело for /dz/ though, if you want a perfect 1:1 glyph to phoneme mapping.
Cyrillic in general is surprisingly good as a "universal alphabet" if you also consider historical letters and not just the current ones. It has unambiguous glyphs for all labial, alveolar, retroflex, and velar plosives, affricates, and fricatives, a uniform way to represent plain/palatalized/velarized distinction for any consonant, and if you consistently use "ь" for palatalization of consonants you can also repurpose the "soft" vowels to indicate fronting of vowels specifically.
In IPA notation, it's the difference between [ʎɵ] and [ʎjɵ], and contrasting the two is fairly rare in natural languages; East Slavic is somewhat unusual in that regard. If someone's language does not have this contrast, it sounds very similar to them, and distinguishing the two can be very difficult. Even in languages where such a distinction exists, there's a tendency towards a merger - Serbo-Croatian is one example of that, but the same is also happening in e.g. some dialects of Spanish with "ñ" [ɲ] vs "ny" [nj]. English speakers also have this problem with Spanish, by the way, hence why "cañon" became "canyon".
In general, what's perceived as "very different" or not is very subjective based on what one is used to. E.g. the distinction between "v" and "w" is very significant in English, but for speakers of many Slavic languages, those are allophones, and when they learn English they have trouble using them correctly.
True, same for Chinese and their tones. One would think it should be pretty easy to distinguish them, but even when doing basic homework it sometimes hard to tell one from another.
Russian has terminal de-voicing; so /d/ softens to a /t/, hence сад = /sat/. (Sort of; actually it's something in between, but the shift is noticable).
And /l/ palatizes (becomes /lj/) before both е and ё, as in самолёт. (Actually the /j/ is built into ё of course, but somehow it seems helpful to recognize the commonality of the sounds when realized after /l/ - basically е becomes more yoff-like).
The vowel might differ (one may be more fronted or rounded than the other), but that tends to vary among speakers anyway.
Russian has a whole suite of secondary rules like this.
Ukrainian by contrast is much more phonetic. But unlike English, at least Russian has a system.
No natural language is actually 100% phonetic. Romanian is no exception. Romanian spelling and pronunciation are close to phonetic, but the same is true of German.
A writing system being phonetic would be impractical, because most languages have tons of little phonetic alterations of individual sounds depending on position in the word/syllable, regional variation, etc.
What you usually want is that the writing system be phonemic, i.e. that there is a 1:1 correspondence between phonemes (meaningfully distinctive sound units) and characters. Unfortunately, languages evolve, so even if your writing systems starts out as more or less phonemic, over time the sounds of the language will drift and inertia will usually keep the writing system not fully in sync with these changes. This is particularly bad in the case of English, where there's never been a proper spelling reform accounting for the corresponding sound changes.
English should just abandon differentiating vowels all together. All dialects of English shwa unemphasized vowels to some extent, and the different dialects largely boil down to how we pronounce various vowels.
Among European languages, Serbo-Croatian is probably the closest to phonemic spelling. An interesting way to test this is to train a basic language model on a representative language, and then see how many mistakes it makes on words it doesn't know (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) - in this study, Serbo-Croatian scored over 99% for both reading and writing accuracy. Finnish and Turkish are also pretty good.
That should solve all spelling problems forever. :)))