French spelling is fairly regular though, isn't it? My understanding is that each phoneme gets spelled in its own way, and the rules are fairly consistent. Once you've learned them, you can typically read most French words aloud, and even guess at spellings of words.

In contrast, in English, pronunciation and orthography have drifted apart significantly more, which means that while there are rules to how any given phoneme might be written, there are a lot more possibilities for most phonemes, and there's a lot more overlap in terms of the spellings. All this means that it's usually much harder to correctly read aloud an English text containing words you don't know.

This is what makes spelling so difficult in English: it usually has more to do with a word's etymology than how it sounds.