It’s a well known fact that, in English, the way a word is spelled can have little or no relationship to the way it’s pronounced. As a native speaker of Romanian, which is a phonetic language, I find the pronunciation of single vowels particularly confusing.
To illustrate, here’s a completely non-scientific correspondence between what an English speaker thinks he’s saying and what my brain translates it to:
| Letter | What I hear |
|---|---|
| A | EI |
| E | II |
| I | AI |
| O | ĂU |
| U | IU |
| Y | UAI |
Because of this, my chances of ever winning a spelling bee contest are severely handicapped.
Update: Here is comprehensive treatment of the consonants: How selected consonants sound around Europe, in 9 maps