Joshua Bright for The New York Times

A few weeks back, we wrote about the myriad ways to pronounce, and mispronounce, the Van Wyck Expressway and offered to track down correct pronunciations for New York place names that reduce readers to guesswork or mumbling.

While Van Siclen Avenue in Brooklyn, Zerega Avenue in the Bronx and Dieterle Crescent in Queens all made the list, the most requested tongue-trippers included Spuyten Duyvil, along with Kosciuszko and Goethals (as in bridge).

For those three, we went to the experts — native speakers of the mother tongue in question — for a quick language lesson.

Ewa Zadworna understands why non-Polish speakers may have trouble correctly pronouncing the name for the 1939 truss bridge that links Greenpoint in Brooklyn to Maspeth, Queens.

Spanning Newton Creek, the Kosciuszko Bridge is named for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, an American Revolution military hero. While trapped in traffic on the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that bears his moniker, you have time to imagine every possible way to mangle saying this name out loud should you ever be asked for directions.

“The trick is there are many consonants that do not exist in the English language,” said Ms. Zadworna, who hails from Krakow and works in public affairs for Polish consulate.

She then blurted out something that sounded to us like “kash-CHOOV-ska,” said very quickly.

Of course, this isn’t an exact science — different article in The New York Times even list slightly different pronunciation guides, and different native speakers pronounce words differently.

In the Bronx, the streets are lined with tricky titles, including Lyvere Street, Lowerre Place, Fteley Avenue and Schieffelin Avenue.

But the one that a reader went as far as to call a “nemesis” is the Spuyten Duyvil area in Riverdale.

The name comes from the Dutch “Spuit den Duyvil,” which translates to, among other things, “the devil’s spout.”

The name was bestowed by 17th-century Dutch settlers on a now-extinct waterway separating the northern tip of Manhattan from the Bronx mainland, according to the Web site of the Spuyten Duyvil branch of the New York Public Library.

The correct pronunciation is “SPY-ten DYE-vil,” said Arthur Kibbelaar, consul for press and cultural affairs at the Consulate General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, who went on to thumb through the book “Exploring Dutch New York” looking for other names.

Brooklyn, for example, is a Dutch name that when Mr. Kibbelaar pronounced it the old-school way, sounded like “brrrrrooklyn,” with rolling “Rs”.

Brooklyn also happens to be the birthplace of the civil engineer George Washington Goethals, the son of Flemish immigrants whose name graces the Goethals Bridge, which since 1928 has linked Staten Island to Elizabeth, N.J.

Flemings are particularly proud of Goethals, best known for supervising the construction of the Panama Canal, said Kris Dierckx, director of Flanders House, a Flemish cultural outpost in New York.

Mr. Dierckx pronounced Goethals with a soft “g.” It sounded almost like “HOOT-huls.”

He also noted that there was an effort under way to name a Manhattan street after another famous Fleming: St. Damien of Molokai, who worked with lepers in 19th-century Hawaii.

Not that Damien Street will be a cinch to say: it’s actually pronounced “Daum-e-aun.”