I think French actually has very consistent spelling(much more so than English). People just get turned off by the accents acutes and graves and apostrophes.

The important thing, IMO, if you already know one foreign language, try to get out of comparing Russian to a language you already know. Everyone loves doing it, because they can feel themselves at least an "expert" in the one language they know and compare to it(well, since it's this way in French...), but trust me, it's best to just treat Russian as a seperate language, despite any similarities you may see at first.