Because Finnish is phonetic, Finns would demand that I write out English words for them in the phonetic alphabet so that they could match the two up using a decoding tool that they understood. But I did not know the phonetic alphabet and learned spelling by look-and-say/osmosis so this didn't really work.

And then you've got the "is it a hard p or a soft p?" problem, whereby they viewed p and b as the same letter. Also t and d, and v and w. And then were perplexed that I couldn't hear the obvious difference between k and kk or l and ll.