[ingas]

> All that said, Japanese spelling is infinitely worse than English spelling.

I think you're overestimating weirdness of 日本語. For native Russian speaker, Japanese is slightly weirder than English. The only rule: be prepared that every rule could be broken.

[Grue3]

I am also a native Russian speaker (not sure what that has to do with anything though), but English spelling is downright trivial compared to Japanese. I liked the following experiment I read about. A phrase was dictated to native Japanese speakers and they were asked to write it down. They wrote it in like 10 completely different ways, none of which was like the author of the phrase intended it.