[schoen]

I might have been unfair to the parent commenter here; I just realized that "you can read any combination of them" might mean "you know the intended pronunciation of any English text" (including words you've seen before) rather than "you are able to pronounce any conceivable sequence letters" (including letter sequences that never occur in English words). That doesn't necessarily represent confusion about phonotactics; it might just be a claim that an alphabetic writing system is always/sometimes easier to learn than the full present-day Japanese writing system. I'm not positive this is true of English orthography, but is probably true for some languages written with the Roman alphabet.