>>There's just a few things I managed to learn - how to pronounce the throaty G
>
>Actaully the G is not to hard for anyone who speaks spanish as it is more or less the same as they pronounce the j in the name josé.

There are degrees in pronouncing the sound - to my ear, of course, ours is the right way (and I've heard it pronounced the same in German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian), Dutch is a bit more throaty, to sound almoust like a hr, and the Hebrew one is on the edge of cough. On the other side, the English aitch is somewhere between audible and not, and the Vietnamese is about as substantial as sound of butterfly wings' flapping.

>It is always funny hearing foreigners strugling with citynames like scheveningen...

Now you bring some memories... when I was 17, I practiced that particular one, and when I got it right, two nice Dutch girls kissed me as a reward :).

>>to pronounce v as somewhere halfway between f and v, and that s should be a bit softer, with a slight sh-ish echo.
>
>Not sure if the is the case.

The girls and pretty much all the Dutch I knew at the time sounded like that... when speaking English, at least. From my set of coordinates, or my auricular point of view, that is.

>>As for vowels, a Dutch sailor once told me that it's actually quite simple, there are five vowels (unpronounceable list here), but it becomes complicated with the five diphthongs: a, e, i, o and u. That's where I understood that the coordinate system is substantially different :).
>
>It can get very confusing for a dutchman to spell a word basically because of the following:
>An 'e' sound like an english 'a'
>An 'i' sound like an english 'e'
>An 'ai' and 'y' sound like an english 'i'
>An 'oe' sounds like an english 'u''
>
>I don't know of any english words that sound like 'a', 'u' or 'ui'

There's only one English word that I know off the top of my head, where u is read as short u - butcher. In all other cases it's read as short ah, or as yu. There's no way to spell it out so an English speaker would pronounce it right, you always need an explanation.

>I always find myself making mistakes when spell a word throught he phone.

My spelling is still slow, even after 40+ years of English. I can spell out at reasonable speed, but I need anyone who's spelling to me to slow down a bit, or I miss half of the letters. To me the letters are still representing sounds, and the idea that they should have names is just strange.