When I first started learning Russian I couldn't believe how easy it was. Once I could hear and pronounce the differences between ы / и and ш / щ / ж I could guess how to spell or pronounce a word and I'd be right like 90% of the time. I don't even hit that with English words I know, but rarely use.
But the ridiculous spelling situation in English is caused by the same thing that lead to it becoming an analytical language with all these helper words in the first place: It's a disastrous mismash of at least 4 different languages.
Our grammar couldn't grow to handle the complexity. In a Bayesian free energy sense, the complexity got pushed into the language instead. But this actually makes English much easier to use for commerce because partial speakers can stumble word to word without having to think it all out first. It's a smoother learning curve.
With Russian it's the opposite. The grammar is how the words all apply to each other, so the word order is very flexible. Instead it's used to indicate emphasis, which is why Russians can sound kinda displeased when they talk. Well, one of the reasons why, anyway. It's why their literature is so great. We have to do all these gymnastics to avoid using italics to indicate emphasis, whereas it just falls out naturally.[0]
Longterm life goal is to get to at least a strong B1 / weak B2 with Russian and to read the classics slowly. Right now I'm stuck with side-by-side English-Russian short stories.
[0] Though our language does have the advantage of a huge vocabulary, so though our literature might not be quite as good as Russian it's still pretty great.