I have a thick accent and find some words like "hippopotamus" difficult to pronounce.
What accent or dialect do you use?
My mother tongue is German. Hippopotamus is Nilferd. Sounds funny to you, yes? Like a bad name for nert?
Nilferd?  That's interesting.  What other words are tough to pronounce ?
Ah, let me think...
English orthography
English orthography is the system of writing conventions used to represent spoken English in written form that allows readers to connect spelling to sound to meaning.
Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardization. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell nearly every phoneme (sound), and most letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. Several orthographic mistakes are common even among native speakers. This is mainly due
quoted a Stanford grad student describing something called the "California vowel shift": "If you try to think about what you think a surfer or a skater or a valley girl talks like, and do it, you can feel your mouth feels different. And I think that has to do a lot with the way that the vowels are shifting." At a SXSW Q&A panel, Armisen said that to do the "Californians" accent: "You have to pronounce every single consonant and vowel." According to Hader