"Ghoti" is an artificial example that doesn't actually work if you account for the way positioning affects pronunciation. Pull up a list of words that start with "gh": none of them (unless "ghoti" itself is on the list) start with an /f/ sound. You'll find the same for words ending in "ti" and the /ʃ/ sound.
I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!
To be fair, the "ghoti" joke is not about pronunciation but rather about the perceived mismatch between the way a word is written and the way it is spoken.
Not exactly. Pronunciation varies between dialects and accents; it is the subject of a linguistic discipline called "phonology"; writing systems or difficulties arising from their "irregularities" with respect to spoken word do not concern it. Put differently, speech and pronunciation, while related, are not the same.
I recommend asking people how "ough" is pronounced instead. Cough, bough, though, thought, through, thorough, hiccough--enough!