They say pronunciation is so tricky in English... yes, it is true to a certain extent. There are written rules in Phonetics that help you not to mispell a word, but whet it comes to surnames, Geographical names or borrowed words or archaisms, well, things get a bit more complicated... and then there are so many homophones... how on Earth can you tell them apart?
The problem of English (and mostly British English!) is that writing/spelling is ethymological (i.e., it is inherited and we can actually say that nowadays we write in the same way they did in the last century...) and consequently, pronunciation is also inherited! There is no other way than to practise and read a lot in order to get the hang of it. (I would stress this for some of my students: look the words up in the dictionary!, it helps improve writing and pronunciation!)
Here is a little help to decipher the misteries of English spelling:
Most commonly mispronounced English words
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