Eli5: why do languages have spelling and pronunciation in common? Counting is the easiest example. Most words that are in a foreign language can be almost guessed in English which is very weird to me.
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You are mistaking a subset of foreign languages for the majority.
Languages don’t exist in a vacuum. As humanity expanded out across the world, we became separated into groups. These groups would begin to find new things, express things differently. As time passes some groups split apart, and how they refer to things may change. Sometimes they would interact with other groups and find new words for new things, or better words for existing things. And sometimes misfortune and war kill entire groups of people, whole languages. As such we see that many languages are related to each other. Groups that once spoke one language split apart and through time the language drifts.
Whole family trees of languages start to form. The closer on the tree more related they are. We can group these similar languages together, and divide them into small collections of languages. English is a Germanic language, birthed from the same groups that would go on to form modern German, Dutch, Yiddish among others. As such we can see some very similar words, similar pronunciations. Arm, fan, gas, mental, mild, oval are all examples of English words that, while pronounced a little different, are the same in German.
However no language exists in vacuum. Much of the language is heavily influenced by French, and Latin. This is again a result of intermingling of neighboring groups, just further up on the family tree. As you go further up we find that some 3 billion people’s languages are all intertwined, in a huge web, The Indo European language family. all totally different but zoom in and you can see the connections.
While a large group, you’ll note that tree only makes up some 40% of the population of earth. Your ability to speak English will not help you in the slightest learning Japanese or Chinese or Swahili. It might not even help you with European languages like Hungarian. However as English speakers were more influenced by European languages, and a select few at that. Your experience of foreign language is very likely limited to Romance Languages influenced by Latin, and Germanic languages. This might explain your perception of the similarities of Foreign languages to english.
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