It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.

Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.

It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").