Being a Canadian with American cousins, different pronunciations have been a way of life for me. Sometimes I have to think about what I'm hearing to figure it out but context helps and by the end of the story I've caught up. My uncle always said "crick" for "creek" and "ruff" for "roof". When I took my training as a teacher of English as a second language, we had quite the spirited discussions about how to pronounce words since however we teach it is how language learners will then know it. With a Brit and Kiwi in our class, our vowels got a real workout. It is interesting to note how we string words together in phrases rather than pronouncing each word separately which makes creating those phonetic markings a challenge.