Why English is hard to learn

[Dutchie]

I take it we are all agreed that a vowel requires the "an"?

No sorry but I don't agree.

There are words that start with a vowel that don't require "an".

It's about the pronunciation and not about the actual vowel/consonant.

Hour and hotel are examples of words that start with a consonant that doesn't get pronounced so therefor have "an" (at least that is the "hotel" as I used to know it. If the pronunciation changes over time, the article will change as well)

There are also words that start with a vowel but have a consonant sound and thus have "a".

Examples:

a universe
a university
a useless gadget

[Colwyn]

Yes, your examples start with a "y" ("you" pronunciation) so the word starts with what we might call an honorary consonant. Sometimes, though, the "y" can become an honorary vowel (e.g. sky). Good, English, ain't it?

[Dutchie]

Absolutely luuuuv it.

By the way, you gave the example of yüz.

Have you ever looked up the word "set" in a dictionary?
The number of meanings is just shocking.

[Colwyn]

Without looking it up in the OED I can think of these:
My mind was set on getting a train set but when I was all set to set out to the shop I found our new concrete path hadn’t set – which was a set back. Then I learned my son had been demoted to a lower set in Maths because he couldn’t do set theory and that my dog had been set upon by my neighbour. Not a good day.
Now I’ll go to the bible and see how many I have missed and how many are duplicates

[Dutchie]

Very good.

You only missed a few hundred 

[Scunner]

I thought you meant set in Turkish

As in Set Construction  

[Colwyn]

The Sesli Sozluk Online Dictionary offers 199 Turkish words or phrases as translations for the English set. It also offers 10 English words for the Turkish set - including the somewhat disturbing "head gate" that had me worried until I discovered it was not a hideous medieval torture device but a means of controlling the flow of a river.

[SuzzPuss]

I've just put anchors aweigh into google translate and it came up with çapa aaaal as the Turkish translation.  Impressive.