I like to laugh at americans that they're worse at writing in their language than non-native speakers, but English itself is at least as much at fault as their poor education system. Why would you have "than" and "then" that are spoken exactly the same but have different meanings? I don't think there are many languages that would be worse as an international standard than that randomly mixed inbred dumpster fire for which the relation between written characters and phonemes they represent is a vague suggestion at best.