Ljubljana always gets me.

Abu Dhabi always used to get me as a kid....Abu was OK but couldn't get my head about the Dhabi bit.

At work I often say Bo-go-ta instead of Bogota, Monte Video or the best one La Gos ....just to confuse people.

There are a lot of city names guaranteed to break your tongue. Try:

Akureyri
Analipsi
Chisinau
Craiova
Kangerlussuaq
Kutaisi
Podgorica
Rzeszow
Szczecin
Tbilisi
Timisoara
Uzhgorod

And this is just in Europe, imagine what the rest of the world contains...

If it means hard to pronounce due to snickering through the entire pronunciation.

Intercourse,Pennslyvania
Fuck,Austria
Blue Balls, America *dont know the state.

Edinborough - a pain to pronounce it and an even greater pain to write that city. Some Chinese cities aren't much easier either, like Guangzhou. That name is even pronounced differently, depending on whether you're speaking Cantonese or Mandarin...

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Yes, that is a place

conaly wrote:

Edinborough - a pain to pronounce it and an even greater pain to write that city.

That would be because you've gone out of your way to make it harder for yourself, given it's Edinburgh (pronounced Eddin-bruh, although you can stress it very lightly out to "borough" if you want to try for a cultured air).

Eindhoven wrote:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Yes, that is a place

But it doesn't have an airport.

On topic, some hard to pronounce cities:

Aguascalientes
Antananarivo
Antofagasta
Antsiranana
Bhubaneswar
Chabarovsk
Dnjepropetrovsk
Enontekio
Kwamalasamutu
Lappeenranta
Mawlamyine
Nagykanizsa
Ndjamena
Nyiregyhaza
Ouagadougou
Phitsanulok
Savannakhet
Szombathely
Tegucigalpa
Tsjeljabinsk
Tuguegarao
Visakhapatnam
Yamoussoukro

All of these places exist and they even got an airport (altough sometimes airport is a big word)

XAM2175 wrote:

That would be because you've gone out of your way to make it harder for yourself, given it's Edinburgh (pronounced Eddin-bruh, although you can stress it very lightly out to "borough" if you want to try for a cultured air).

Whoops... For some reason I was sure, "Edinborough" was the correct spelling, but you're right, I made it harder, than it should be Although I'm quite sure you do NOT pronounce it "Eddin-bruh". At least that's what I've been told not to do several times. It should be more like "Ed'n-Burrah".

Foreign? I'll stay within my own country and give you a few

CYHI- Ulukhahaktok (Formerly Holman)
CYYH- Taloyoak (formerly Spence Bay)
CVYM- Qikiqtarjuaq (Formerly Broughton Island)

PatrickZ80 wrote:

Eindhoven wrote:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Yes, that is a place

But it doesn't have an airport.

On topic, some hard to pronounce cities:

Aguascalientes
Antananarivo
Antofagasta
Antsiranana
Bhubaneswar
Chabarovsk
Dnjepropetrovsk
Enontekio
Kwamalasamutu
Lappeenranta
Mawlamyine
Nagykanizsa
Ndjamena
Nyiregyhaza
Ouagadougou
Phitsanulok
Savannakhet
Szombathely
Tegucigalpa
Tsjeljabinsk
Tuguegarao
Visakhapatnam
Yamoussoukro

All of these places exist and they even got an airport (altough sometimes airport is a big word)

Like most of the cities in this thread, the problem here is not the spelling but the comprehensibility of that spelling to someone who doesn't speak the language that spelling originated in. For example, Aguascalientes is a perfectly easy to pronounce word if you speak any Spanish. Dnipropetrovsk is a problem of transliterating from Cyrillic (Ukrainian in this case) to the Latin alphabet, in the course of which you lose some of the important letters that tell you how to actually pronounce to the word. One level deeper for Ouagadougou and Yamoussoukro, which are words in West African languages rendered in French orthography, which makes them hard for native English speakers to pronounce.

Thanks to a special promo I booked a flight to an airport I couldn't pronounce, nor did I know where exactly it was located:

Bydgoszcz Ignacy Jan Paderewski Airport

Thiruvananthapuram anyone?

Although I have been told by a local it's pronounced exactly as it's written it's just an abnormally long name.

while not difficult to pronounce, Whakatane in New Zealand is one that might raise a few eyebrows. ( In Maori "wh" makes a "f" sound)

Some of my favourites are Icelandic airports, like Isafjordur and Vestmannaeyjar

conaly wrote:

Although I'm quite sure you do NOT pronounce it "Eddin-bruh".

I live about an hour's train ride away from the place and I reckon I'm pretty close. Like I said the first time though, there's room to manoeuvre around the exact pronunciation of the latter part of the name based on your accent and that of the company you're in.

"Edinboro", on the other hand, is totally out.

Phuket comes to my mind. With all respect to our Thai colleagues, but I always think of it as F*ck it.

TR763 wrote:

Phuket comes to my mind. With all respect to our Thai colleagues, but I always think of it as F*ck it.

However in Thai the ph is pronounced as p, not as f. Therefor you pronounce it as puket, not fuket.

Same thing happened once with someone talking about Paro, Bhutan. Paro is sometimes written as Pharo and therefor he was pronouncing at as Faro. At first I didn't understand what he meant as I was thinking about Faro in Portugal. I had to explain to him that not in every language ph is pronounced as f, there are languages where it is pronounced as p.

Eyjafjallajökull - Where the 2010 volcanic eruptions happened that caused massive air travel woes.

Sequim, WA, USA

Now that I think about it, Los Angeles seems hard to get right, especially the "Los" part.

Lucky for us, the world's longest place name was shortened, albeit erroneously, to a very pronounceable Bangkok. That's actually the name of a hamlet and not the Thai capital but it has stuck, so..... Anyway its correct pronunciation is "bun(as in bundle)-kok", not "bang-kok" but very few non-Thai knows or cares.

In case you want to know, here's the transliterated name that even the locals had trouble reciting in full. They usually call it by the first word; Krungthep. Here you go, a tongue-contorting mouthful: Krungthep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit

In Thai Script: กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลก ภพนพรัตน์ ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์ มหาสถาน อมรพิมาน อวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะ วิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์

And the translation: The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (of Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.

one would think Houston would be easy, but some people, especially Yankees, say "yew-ston" ...aghhhhh
Or like Zod in Superman Two "who-ston"

Thiruvananthapuram
I've tried it so often and still fail.
There's also many Chinese cities that I'm probably mispronouncing but so far I didn't get slapped by anyone for accidently saying something inapropriate.

Bydgoszcz, Rzeszow, Дніпропетровськ and most European tongue twisters are not that horrible once you know how certain letter combinations are pronounced. Still nothing you'd want to get in a Spellingbee

PanzerPowner wrote:

If it means hard to pronounce due to snickering through the entire pronunciation.

Intercourse,Pennslyvania
Fuck,Austria
Blue Balls, America *dont know the state.

Intercourse and Blue Ball (not plural) are both in Amish country of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, East of Harrisburg. They are about 10 miles apart.

Intercourse is in Leacock Township, Blue Ball is in East Earl Township.

There's a Blue Ball in Ohio, too. Lot's of Amish there, also.

One of the trickiest is Växjö airport (VXO) in southern Sweden. The "xj" part is a a back throat ch sound that is not only unique to Swedish, it is unique to the town as it is only word that has it! In IPA it is this -> /ˈvɛkːɧøː/.

Try Akureyri in Iceland, Svalbard in Norway, Rijeka or Osijek in Croatia or even in Kosice in Slovakia seems to divide opinion on proper pronounciation.

LH748 wrote:

Bydgoszcz, Rzeszow, Дніпропетровськ and most European tongue twisters are not that horrible once you know how certain letter combinations are pronounced. Still nothing you'd want to get in a Spellingbee

At least Дніпропетровськ/Dnipropetrovsk is a little easier now, as it has been renamed as simply as Дніпро/Dnipro (DEE-nep-ro).

Finnish is nice: Kittilä or Kokkola-Pietarsaari or Jyväskylä and of cource: Seinäjoki (Wallriver...)

PatrickZ80 wrote:

Chisinau

This can be very easy for an english speaker:

Key she KNOW

These 2 Russian ones
Mineralnye Vody
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

I agree that being able to read Cyrillic definitely helps with the pronunciation of Russian cities. Transcriptions vary a lot.
It's kinda interesting how it is completely normal to pronounce certain bigger cities with their English name (e.g. Munich, Vienna, Copenhagen) while less commonly known city names seem to demand a correct local pronunciation. Never really realized this until now.

dc9northwest wrote:

PatrickZ80 wrote:

Chisinau

This can be very easy for an english speaker:

Key she KNOW

If you know how to pronounce it it's never difficult, but from the way it's spelled you mostly can't tell. If I were to pronounce Chisinau without knowing how to pronounce it I would pronounce it very different from that. And that's what this threat is all about, cities where you don't know how to pronounce their names.

Another example is the Polish city of Lodz. Doesn't seem too difficult, does it? However, someone once told me it is being pronounced as Woods. That doesn't sound anything like how it's written. Polish seems to be a very difficult language for someone who doesn't speak it. Bydgoszcz and Szczecin? Probably easy to pronounce but from how it's written you can't tell.

But even in America you sometimes come across names that make you wonder how it's pronounced. Albuquerque for example, how on earth do you pronounce that?

LH748 wrote:

I agree that being able to read Cyrillic definitely helps with the pronunciation of Russian cities. Transcriptions vary a lot.
It's kinda interesting how it is completely normal to pronounce certain bigger cities with their English name (e.g. Munich, Vienna, Copenhagen) while less commonly known city names seem to demand a correct local pronunciation. Never really realized this until now.

Many bigger cities got their names translated. Munich is München in German, Vienna is Wien. The Hague is Den Haag.

To me it's Latrobe, PA (LBE). Whenever I work the gate for my airline's LBE flight I'm never sure if I should should "Luh-trobe" or "Lay-trobe". The passengers seem to have conflicting views on it as well!

Well, as a foreigner living in the US, here's a list of places in the US hard to pronounce for me (and probably to a lot of other foreigners living here):

Louisville - why Loo-ee-ville and not Lewis-ville?
Chattanooga - plain hard to pronounce
Tennessee - not hard to pronounce, but all the double letters kill me
Massachusetts - extremely hard to pronounce correctly
Connecticut - extremely hard to pronounce correctly
Des Moines - I gave up on this one. I heard several versions on how to say it...
Boise - can't help to look at it and say Boys. Why Boy-zee?
Tucson - one of my favorites. Pronounced something like Tyu-ZON. But it always comes out to me as Took-sohn
And finnaly my favorite:
Lake Tahoe - my wife cracked up so much when I looked at her and said: "hey, why don't we go to Lake Ta-ho-EE?" Now I know it's Ta-HO

Languages...

patineta89 wrote:

Well, as a foreigner living in the US.....

Very true, those american city names are a nightmare to pronounce. There is no obvious logic in english pronounciation, and many of them are not even english. Or does anybody know a "logical" explanation how to pronounce through, though, plough, cough?

patineta89 wrote:

Languages...

I'm glad to be used to a wide variety of languages at my doorstep. From my not so large german home airport they have direct flights to 113 foreign airports in 38 countries, where people speak almost as many languages, but in only 3 of them the language is english. Some of them have both a german (like Kopenhagen, Warschau, Venedig, Lissabon, Athen) and english (Copenhagen, Warsaw, Venice, Lisbon, Athens) name differing from the the local København, Warszawa, Venezia, Lisboa, Αθήνα. Some others might have an old german name that gladly almost nobody uses anymore (anybody still calling Cluj Napoca "Klausenburg" or Ljubljana "Laibach"?). Others like London, Paris, are spelled the same, but pronounced in a german way (but "Paris" is pronounced wrong in english too). In many other cases Europeans are simply used to (more or less) the local pronounciation.

Gruß, masi1157