I figured out the gh at one point. Gh used to be its own phoneme. It slowly phased out of spoken english and got replaced by semi-random similar sounding phonem

I figured out the gh at one point. Gh used to be its own phoneme. It slowly phased out of spoken english and got replaced by semi-random similar sounding phonemes. This g(h)/ch phoneme still exists in dutch and german though, and once you know about it you start finding a lot of cognates between the languages!