LanguageHat links to a Wikipedia list of names with non-intuitive pronunciation.
Having embarassed myself in the past with transliterating Ree-ding for the city of Reading, and Edin-boorg for Edinburgh, I learned my lesson.
My trick (well, once I’ve identified that there’s some sort of “danger” with the name, because Reading, for example, seems very innocent) is to google the pronunciation. I assume that if a name has a non-intuitive pronunciation, it would appear with its pronunciation in parenthesis. So for Reading, I would search: “reading pronounced” (with the quotes, which lock the two words together), and get: Reading (pronounced Red-ding).
Try it, it’ll save you from mistakes with Reading and Edinburgh, which, interestingly enough, don’t appear on the Wiki list. I wonder, are they perhaps non-intuitive to me, as a Hebrew speaker, but more intuitive to native English speakers? or is it because these cities are very well-known, that they are not listed?
Word Play 