What do people learning English as a second language think to our language?

I was looking at other language's alphabets, Japanese for example, they write their letters with intricate lines and most involve a consonant with a vowel 'Wa' for example is just written as one letter. So then I got thinking, is our alphabet hard to learn for foreigners? We have 26 letters which seems pretty easy really but then when you think about it each one then has a lower case. For example the letter R is 'ah' & 'ruh' isn't that really 2 letters fobbed off as one (R & r)? I also noticed a lot of our words don't really sound like they are spelt, I wonder to myself how on earth did I make it through infant school sometimes, for example sugar & water. Shouldn't they have been spelt shuger & worter? So I was wondering what other language speakers coming to learn English thought of our alphabet and our strange way of spelling things?