Fair. I'm more than a little worried on the perceptions, though. Having arguments with people who think that the English alphabet is not phonetic really hurt my views there.
It's very much only approximately phonetic. This is painfully obvious when you compare with a language like Spanish that has very few exceptions to the 1-1 letter-sound mapping (and even those are fairly consistent). And yes, I did learn to read with phonics.
But for the real difficulty learning English, consider all the forms of "be" and the weird rules for which one to use. (Spanish is only dubiously better in this respect; there are still a lot of verb forms you just have to memorize, but at least you can follow actual rules on which form to use.)
