My mother was a grade school teacher who introduced a phonics program into the primary grades in place of the Scott-Foresman “Look-Say” method popular at the time. I had passed by her class by then, so I didn’t learn phonics from her, but she used to say that most English words could be pronounced correctly if you knew a few simple rules, like…all vowels are short unless (rule for exception…)…and more rules that I forget.
But she used to boast that her very young students would astonish their parents by being able to read the daily paper out loud. No one was saying they understood what the words meant, but they could pronounce most words respectably using the limited set of phonetic rules.
Words that didn’t follow the rules simply had to be memorized as exceptions. I found it interesting that most of the exceptions are simple words common to most vocabularies. The more complex words seem to follow the rules better.