What the Phuc?

Hes a big f%#*a!

I get congratulations.

But how do you pronounce mountain and water?  The "t" should be the same pronunciation in both.

You are correct that you fall into the "d" sound in water.  If you give it a full "t" sound, it falls into a different accent.  I was trying to figure out what you were getting at.

This whole conversation hints of elitism.  But the fact that we have energy and internet capable of carrying on the conversation in the first place smacks of elitism, so we might as well keep falling down the rabbit-hole.

I know that this is meant to be silly.  But this is awful news!  Any committee, department, "ministry" named Public Safety/Security is never a good thing and almost always is antithetical to public safety/security.  Hopefully, things work out well for the Vietnamese.

On the first day of my first year of Spanish as a freshman in high school, my teacher said that Spanish is easy to learn because it is always spelled like it sounds. English on the other hand...

Then he asked us how to pronounce "ghoti." goatee? goatai?

No, that is pronounced "fish." tough, women, and nation. 
You're right. English can be daunting to new speakers. 

Diatribe is right.  I don't know why you're so bent out of shape that my teacher merely used an educational tool to illustrate the far-ranging rules of English, but whatever. Diatribe away, even if you are inaccurate to a great degree and far more full of it than Mr. Tovey ever was. The tool he used, "ghoti" as "fish," has been used by many people over many years to demonstrate that English has either a lot of exceptions to its pronunciation rules or a lot more pronunciation rules than most western European languages. Mr. Tovey was one of those people who used the tool. You seem to take it as an attack on something.   

Oddly enough, you use his use of the tool as evidence that he "is full of it off the bat" and has "a lack of understanding of the English language" and yet only two lines later you admit that, "Among Western European languages, English is probably the hardest for pronunciation of words, based upon spelling," which was my teacher's (and my) whole point! So why the need for a diatribe? 

You assert that the modern pronunciations of "gh" as "f" and "ti" as "sh" are mispronunciations because some time ago they were pronounced differently than their modern usage. Wrong. That the modern pronunciations would be mispronunciations some unknown time ago has no relevance today except as an illustration of the evolution of the English language. Today, in modern English, "gh" often has the sound of an "f" and "ti" often has the sound of "sh," simple as that. 

Furthermore, the fact that my Spanish teacher, whose first language is American-English, used "gh" at the beginning of a non-word to illustrate the "f" sound that those two letters often make when placed together does not make him "full of it off the bat." The use of "gh" instead of the commonly used "ph" for the "f" sound at the beginning of ghoti is to accentuate the point that the rules of English really do tend to wander. Why have tough and photograph when you can have touph and photogragh? Why not have both end in one or the other?  

Nor does the fact that my Spanish teacher didn't mention the English rule that "ti" is only pronounced "sh" when followed by a vowel show "a lack of understanding of the English language." You also didn't mention that "gh" can be silent after following "au" or "ou" in your post. So what. The point is not to have an in-depth discussion of the various ways that "ti" of "gh" can be pronounced according to the rules of English. The point is to illustrate that the pronunciation of English words, based on their spelling, is often not intuitive, a point which you admit. 

You started with the point that the "x" in "Mexico" as hard evidence that Spanish is also loose with the rules. Of course there are exceptions in Spanish, but nowhere near the extent you see in English.

But is the "x" in "Mexico" an exception? Not according to your rules. According to you, "ti" was pronounced "tea" some unknown number of years ago and "gh" was pronounced hard, Scottish "ch" some unknown number of years ago and because they were pronounced that way some unknown number of years ago, the modern pronunciations of "sh" and "f" are mispronunciations.

You will be happy to know that during the 17th century, around the time when Spain and Portugal were turning the Americas into colonies and helping the natives see the Glory of God, the word “Mexico” was very likely derived from the name that the local natives used to describe the valley surrounding modern day Mexico City. Also at the time, the Spanish "x" was pronounced with a soft "j" sound in Spanish, like the name Javier. Thus, the “x” in “Mexico” is pronounced with as a soft Spanish “j,” like “Javier.”

Ghoti as strawman. That's funny. If you think about it for a short amount of time, if "fish" had been spelled "ghoti" so many  years ago, you wouldn't bat an eye at that being the spelling. Or maybe you wouldn't if it was spelled phish or phisch or phische or fishe.