[gizmo686]

For Japanese, the choose to talk only about the phonetic system is doing a lot of work, as it is (mostly) just used for grammatical purposes, with most content words being mostly or entirely composed of the non-phonetic Kanji. A typical Japanese student is still learning to write until high school. Presumably, Chinese is similarly difficult for the same reason, but I'm not familiar with that.

Hebrew's writing system has vowels, but they are typically omitted.