English is horrible to learn

The best way to learn English is to be born into an Anglo-speaking family. For everyone else on the planet, learning is fraught with frustrations. Here's one example:

OVER

The common pronunciation is Oh-ver. Put a D in front Dover, a UK city.

Put an R in front and it is a common name for a dog or a person who travels. Put the word Land in front of Rohver and it is vehicle.

CLOVER

Clover is pronounced cloh-ver. Take away the C and you have Lah-ver a person who loves.

Put an M in place of the Cl and you have Moo-ver.

This doesn't cover my Bostonian accent where to me the word over is pronounced ohveh but regional accents are for another blog.

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet which writes out words with symbols, but even that has limitations and has been changed over the years.

Because of different languages, when a person learns English, they bring idiosyncrasies of their own language into English just as Anglo speakers carry their idiosyncrasies into the new language.

I say one sentence in French and the French assume I'm from England, but that's because of my Bostonian accent. Who needs Rs when an H will do perfectly well. Try as I might, I can't roll the R like a French or Spanish speaker.

It's annoying when some American says to a person, "Speak English you're in America." They show their ignorance of the difficulty in learning and using a second language. 

When anyone mocks an accent, it shows they are unaware the second you leave your native area, you probably will have some kind of accent. After we moved to West Virginia from Boston my mother would call the grocery store to order. More than once she heard in the background, "It's that Dammed Yankee. You take her. I can't understand her." 

The O in over is just one example of a vowel which is a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract. Like many vowels the geography of its placement determines if it is short or long, oh, ah, or even ooo. It doesn't explain why the change of os in clover and lover.

When my husband was taking French, he would ask the teacher why certain words were said like they were. She would shrug and say, "It's French." In learning English we might not want to research a word for its origins, its regional variations or maybe it's better to just shrug and simply say, "It's English" and memorize the correct pronunciation.

Note: IPA Chart with Sounds – International Phonetic Alphabet Sounds