What’s the problem with English? Words are difficult to read aloud and when you listen to a word it’s difficult to spell them. So, let’s first go through some considerations.

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Some alphabetic languages, such as Spanish, have relatively simple spelling because there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them.

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English spelling is more complex, because it attempts to represent (about) 40 phonemes (specific sounds) of the spoken language with an alphabet composed of only 26 letters (and with no help of accents). As a result, two letters are often fused together into groups that represent distinct sounds, referred to as digraphs. For example “t” and “h” placed side by side are used to represent either /θ/ or /ð/, which are different from the sounds of “t” and “h” alone.
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Why are sounds difficult to write? why are words difficult to read?

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In other words: Why isn’t there a one-to-one correspondence between the graphic representations (spelling) and phonemes (sounds)?

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It’s not only in English that this problem happens. In Portuguese, for Example, The pronunciation of “m” in “mamãe” is different from the pronunciation of “m” in “bem” or “tem”. In the word “também” the 1st and the 2nd “m” sound different. The same happens with “l”, which is pronounced differently in “janela” and “sol”.

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The problem in English is in its history: It has absorbed large amounts of words from other languages over time, without changing the spelling of those words (without anglicizing them). As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of five languages (Old English, Old Norse, Norman French, Classical Latin and Greek) superimposed upon one another.

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Sometimes the same phenomenon happens in Portuguese, although it is rarer. Have you ever tried to order a “Mupy” pronouncing the word as you should read it in Portuguese? I have, many times: I was never understood =(
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So English has not anglicized the words adopted from other languages. This means that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. For example, the letters ee almost always represent /iː/, but the sound can also be represented by the letters e (as in “evening”),  y (as in “tiny”) ey (“Mickey”), ea (“leave”), and more rarely as ei (as in receive”).

Okay, that can be confusing, but there’s no reason for panic. The spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. To be able to understand these conventions you’ll need first to understand some concepts (basic concepts of what different sounds have in common, and may, thus, fall into the same categories).
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Let’s start by the beginning: “And said God let there be light, and there was light…” (ks, ks). Okay… not from the beginning beginning… Let’s start with vowels.
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Vowel phonics patterns

.•    Short vowels are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u when they produce the sounds /æ/ as in cat, /ɛ/ as in get, /ɪ/ as in sit, /ɒ/ as in hot, and /ʌ/ as in cup. listen (for more)

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•    Long vowels have the same sounds as the names of the single letter vowels, such as /eɪ/ in baby, /iː/ in me, /aɪ/ in I, /oʊ/ in go, and /juː/ in dude. Long vowels sounds are taught as being “the same as the names of the letters.” listen (for more)

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•     Schwa – all vowels can have the sound of shwa in English. The schwa is an indistinct sound of a vowel in an unstressed syllable, represented by the linguistic symbol /ə/. It is the sound made by the o in lesson, the a in about, the u in butter, the e in taken, or the i in pencil.

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That’s all for now. In time, you’ll see that if you follow the phonics lessons you’ll get a better idea of how to read and write words in English.

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for further practice: the podcasts at this page can be a little too overwhelmingly detailed for the begginner’s taste. I suggest for a practice that you click on the links under the topic Sound pronunciation practice (left column) and do the exercises there (for both pages on long and short vowels), instead of listening to the podcast.