We have a park here...

Champoeg state park.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champoeg,_Oregon

Sham-pooie.

Because in Old Dutch, the letter g is pronounced like a y when it's at the end of a word.

The word for yacht is jacht in Dutch, so that one's easy.

What makes it slightly harder is that jacht can also mean hunt.

However, the hardest part of learning English when you're Dutch is trying not to sound like Mark Rutte.

That's because when you learn a foreign language correctly, you start with boat or ship and add subdivisions of those as your command of the language improves. You can fuck up a lot and still be understood too. People who are native English speakers have a tendency to get hung up on using languages correctly instead of just using them. The question "when you boat go water?" is the same as " when does your yacht set sail?" But much easier to say when you dont have a large vocabulary.

Also having a bunch of people who understand your native language doesn't incentivise you to learn. It's something I notice a lot with people who come over from Eastern and central Europe. Some of them will have almost no vocabulary and then a couple of months later can hold a conversation and are pretty fluent within the year. Whereas a Brit can live in Spain for a decade and stil only know a couple of sentences in Spanish.

What about thought, through, tough, though... wtf?! It took me many many years to finally understand this crazyness lol

Mandarin

50 000 characters used to live here

As a mainly spanish speaker the word that sent me is "brought" and being told is a monosyllabic word I swear I can clanly pass C2 tests and probably C3 tests and that shit still gets me even 10 years working with english speakers.
Also I laugh at any attempt of a pronunciation rule, english is a collage of borrowed words between Latin Anlgic later Fench and some made up ones. A specific word has a way to be pronounced and that's it same syllables in another word can be totally different. When I fail one I got a great trick, if they ask what pronunciation is that I say "Scotland, Ye cannae show I'm wrang"

Lol in Polish

I remember when I was a kid and we started learning foreign languages in school. My class got divided into two halves, ones that study English and other that study German. Few month later I was walking down the street with my classmate and he went like:

• Oh, so you're studying English, huh? What does DUHR mean?

• What?

• DUHRR

• Oh, you mean door? It's spelled do-o.

• Bro, there's an R in there and two O's. DUHR. Even I know that, and I'm not even the one studying English. If door was do-o, then would you spell TOH DOH as "to do"?

Little did the bro know... I hope he at least got German well enough, AFAIK there's little bullshit like that

Oiseau

I think "Eunuch" might be a worse offender of this

Also, how do you pronounce 'stingy'... 'Raphael'...

Tough, though and thorough were a major step for me back in the days...I never knew which one was which nor how to spell them, I felt so frustrated!