[tuomosipola]

Same here. This whole discussion is funny and absurd. Finnish is really phonetic in its spelling (there are about three exceptions that come to my mind right now). There's also not that much historical baggage, so reforms have been possible.

We rote-learned French spelling at and early age and I can still read French.

English, on the other hand, has one of the most difficult alphabetic spelling systems. I have used English for tens of years and I still have problems pronouncing a word now and then. One of the problems being that English doesn't indicate stress (which native speakers automatically know).