My 6-yr old daughter is facing the biggest challenge of her life (so far...): trying to figure out how English words are spelt! English might be the default, global language and all that, but it faces a major disadvantage: it's got the funniest spelling system that can fox the most diligent of learners. Since most of the English words are actually derived from various other languages, Latin, Greek, etc., we end up with almost crazy spellings, replete with silent vowels and consonants!
My daughter just doesn't like learning spellings by rote... she tries to derive the spelling based on how it sounds. Which is how any logical brain must work. So she wrote "beautiful" as "butiful"... unfortunately, English is not a phonetic language, unlike, say, the Indian languages. Words don't spell as they sound. So, you need to "learn" the spellings of words... (this has of course spawned an industry in itself and a national pastime in the US called Spelling Bee)...
Most of us older people who have the excuse of character limit of an SMS or a Twitter message (or actually, sheer laziness!) have created our own version of English that is largely phonetic. All of us have turned on SpellCheck in our word processors and mail programs and don't have a real need to remember spellings. Voice to text conversion software is taking away the need for us to even type or write.
But, our kids have to learn, by heart, in an unnatural manner, spellings of words that sound very different from how they are taught to pronounce them.
As we heard in Namak Halaal, English is a very funny language!