I remember that, when I was starting to learn English, I was learning spellings by remembering a Croatian word that would be spelled the same way. For instance, for the spelling of the word "bicycle", I would remember a "Croatized" pronunciation bee-tsee-kle.
I am pretty sure I had a big advantage compared to native English speakers when learning to write English, because I already knew what vowels and consonants were, I knew what a digraph was, I knew what a consonant cluster was, and native English speakers usually don't know that when learning how to write.
Nowadays it's so automatized to me that I sometimes catch myself not being able to recite the letters of a word, yet I am able to write it correctly.