Why you should know: The ‘a’ vs ‘an’ conundrum is not about what letter actually begins the word, but instead about how the sound of the word starts.
For example, the ‘h’ in ‘hour’ is silent, so you would say ‘an hour’ and not ‘a hour’. A trickier example is Ukraine: because the ‘U’ is pronounced as ‘You’, and in this case the ‘y’ is a consonant, you would say “a Ukraine” and not “an Ukraine”.
Tip: when in doubt, sound it out(loud).
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Uhhh I actually might need an example? Just one, though?
The Cyrillic character ё is pronounced as “yo”, but when preceded by some consonants, it becomes an “o”. It is consistently mistranslated and mispronounced by anglophones. The correct pronunciation of “Gorbachev” (Горбачёв) is “Gorbachov” and it should be written as such. The other, Хрущёв, is even worse.
Last time I saw someone say that anglicized words should be spelled as they should be pronounced, they were downvoted and shamed for being a prescriptivist.