The Hardest Words to pronounce!

I think words whose spelling differs significantly from the pronunciation (e.g. colonel, yacht, quay) are the hardest ones to learn. I often tend to think of these words as words with an 'irregular pronunciation'. I personally find pronouncing proper and geographical names difficult sometimes. Unless you know how 'River Thames' is to be pronounced it's virtually impossible to get it right. The same is true for 'Reading' and 'Antruther', to name but a few.

EnglishDVD.com wrote:

my students have real difficulty with ship / sheep and well... sheet and another word! it can be embarrassing but luckily sheet isn't a word used very often.

This is a familiar dilemma with many students, I should think. Relatively few languages have as many native vowel sounds as the English language.

At my company, we have to say "borrower" quite often. It's fine once, but by the third time, it starts sounding like "barr-rr."

My personal one is "jewelry." I don't say joo-ell-ry, but jool-ry. People make fun of me.

Regionally, when people say "drawer" as "draw" or "tour" as "tur"  it just makes me cringe. But not as much as hearing our nation's capital referred to as "Warshington."