Agreed. I memorised Hiragana and Katakana fairly quickly when learning Japanese, and even then, the language itself felt like it had some sort of logic to it (with good justifications for why some things are as they are), which made it easier to follow after learning the alphabets.

People think that it must be rock-solid because it's full of weird symbols. By the same token, the foreign person attempting to learn English might have a lot more trouble, for all its complexities and idiosyncrasies.