As someone living in a slavic country, i never understood the english/americans and their spelling bees, because 99% of the words in my language (slovene) can be spelled by phonetics (with some, but few exceptions), but english had a bunch of weird rules and extra letters, especially when you come to british (ahem "leicester"). Serbian for example is even more literal with "write how you say it and say it how you write it", and that includes "Britni Spirs" and "Arnold Švarceneger".

If you didn't know the spelling for "xylophone", you'd assume it's "zylophone", but for some reason there's an 'x' there. Waiting in line? Well, you have to "queue" but not "cue". Sure, historic reasons, like with "ye olde pub" not having a "yee" there... but it's a pain to learn, especially for children who are not that exposed to englsh texts (but mostly cartoons, especially in my time, where dubbing was almost non-existant). Same for french (ahem "jouaient").

On the other hand, we have some messed up rules too... slovenia was a part of yugoslavia, but we don't have the leter "ć", while most yugoslav countries do. We also have a rule that we write words (especially names) from non-latin alphabets phonetically (president of china is "Ši Džinping"), with the exception of serbian cyrilic. So, let's say you have someone with a surname (anglicized to) Petrovich ("son of Peter"). If the person is from croatia, his surname is writen in latin alphabet as "Petrović" (note the "ć"), and since it' a latin alphabet, we write it "Petrović", as the original (same for names with "x", "y", "z", "q"" that we also don't natively use). If it's someome from russa etc. (cyrillic) or any other non-latin-alphabet using country, he'd be "Petrovič" (since we don't have the letter "ć" we'd transcribe to "č". But if he's a serb (cyrillic Петровић), he'd be "Petrović" (with a "ć" again).

So yeah...

My languge of choice will be Perl, it's simpler.