One of our in-state beers of Pennsylvania is the much beloved Yuengling, which despite the spelling with the “u” is pronounced /jɪŋlɪŋ/ or “ying-ling.” Obviously the exotic “ue” spelling is a clue that Yuengling did not start out as a native word.
Sure enough, if you head over to the Yuengling brewery site, you will find the explanation that it’s orignally German for “young man”, now spelled as Jüngling ‘youth or youngling’. In the semi-nativized spelling, the “ue” represents the sound /ü/ (or IPA /y/) which is a front-round vowel also found in French. To pronounce /ü/, say /i/ (or “ee”) and round your lips. It should sound a little different from the back rounded vowel /u/.
The next obvious step is that English speakers “fixed” the exotic /ü/ to a sound found in English, namely /i/. The odd thing is that normally, /ü/ is changed to /u/, not /i/. For instance the French expression déjà vu [deʒa vü] is normally pronounced as [deʒa vu] in English not [deʒa vi] (i.e. not “deja vee”).
So why not [juŋlɪŋ] for Yuengling? I’m speculating here, but I think the reason is the [ŋ] “ng” in the first syllable. English does not generally allow [u] or [ʊ] before [ŋ]. That is, you won’t find many “oong” [uŋ] words while “ing”, “ang” and “ong” words are much more common.
The only “oong” word I found in the Oxford English Dictionary was the Australian slang word boong (borrowed from a local aboriginal language). The only other one I know is Star Trek warlord Khan Noonian Soong, but that is meant to be an “Asian name” (and it does exist in Chinese as in Soong Mei Ling, Madam Chang Kai-Shek). Therefore I think it is valid to conclude that English did not favor [uŋ] clusters.
FYI – There are “ung” words, but they are actually pronounced [ʌŋ].
When the pronunciation of Yuengling was being nativized a few centuries ago, I think the normal change of [ü] to [u] was rejected because you would have gotten another disfavored cluster [uŋ], so the only alternate left was to change [ü] to [i].
Interestingly, we do not have names like Carl Jung [juŋ]. It would be interesting to see what would happen to Jüngling today, but in the meantime, the pronunciation of Yuengling has become fixed as “ying ling”…and there’s no going back in this case.

Most phonologists working with the English language have to explain that many vowels in English (specifically /i,e,o,u/ aka “long e, long a, long o, long u”) are actually pronounced as diphthongs in an U.S. English accent (actually all English accents, but details vary a lot).
For instance, the Spanish word “Rico” which is pronounced as [riko] in Spanish will come out something like [ɾijkow] in U.S. accented English or even [ɾijkəw]/[ɾijkew] in Baltimore. This is when a language teacher might try to get Anglo students to “use pure vowels” instead of our diphthongs.
The problem is that English speakers do this diphthong trick unconsciously and often have a hard time hearing the difference, unless they’ve got a good ear or had LING 100.
BUT… the theme song from the classic TV show The Addams Family actually takes advantage of this quirky to produce this interesting rhyme in the second verse

Their house is a museum
Where people come to see ’em
They really are a scre-am (scre’um)
The Addams Family.

–http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/theaddamsfamilylyrics.html

The song writer did notice the hidden diphthong in scream [skriijm], then managed to stretch it out even further to [skriəm] in order to make a rhyme with museum and see’um. An awful pun, but one that’s very informative.

Most intro phonology classes discuss the fact that English /t,d/ are often flapped as the sound [ɾ] (often transcribed as [D]) which is actually the same as Spanish single “r” [ɾ].
For instance
atom /ætəm/ = [æɾəm]
Nevada /nevadə/ = [nevaɾə]
Spanish
pero ‘but’ = [peɾo]
manera ‘manner’ = [maneɾa]
In theory, an English speaker could confuse Spanish “r” and “d”, but in practice English speakers seem to be able to distinguish “d” and “r” (even the Spanish ones) except in some very rare cases.
The one time I experienced a “d/r” confusion from the TV show Roswell which featured a character named Nasedo But for years, I thought his name was Nasero.
I think this word was confusing because it fit the structure of both English and Spanish, and I probably know enough Spanish to think it was an /r/ (the story did take place in New Mexico). In most other cases (e.g. atom, there are other cues (such as the first vowel) to indicate it is English and not Spanish, so an English speaker interprets [ɾ] as either /t,d/.
I also suspect that there could be additional acoustic cues to help Americans distinguish English flap /t,d/ from Spanish flap /r/ … but maybe I’m just seeing spelled out words too.