> is it supposed to be hard somehow for native speakers?
For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance.
I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.
That's not my experience from the short samples in the article, I could get the correct meaning out of all of them at a glance. The only slowdown was in returning to the text after the initial read, to try to puzzle out the exact definitions for the new letters. I'm pretty sure that I could read English in this alphabet almost as fast as the normal one even with no practice.
A contrast only by familiarity. I imagine the difference would vanish very quickly.
As a system for writing English it seems superior to what we have now. Spelling telling you how to pronounce something is how most languages work. English by comparison has no consistent framework, requiring a lot of memorization to build that mapping. ITA is only a stunt in retrospect because it never went anywhere
For mature readers, it is a big contrast because it requires "sounding out" the words instead of being able to decode them in chunks / a whole word at a glance.
I would say it's more of a publicity stunt than anything. It looks kind of like Old English (maybe) and definitely isn't recognizable at a glance, but the fact that the letters make only one sound in this decoding system is a major advantage for beginners.