The Afsluitdijk

-- https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra (through Google translate)

If you're interested in the theory:

Vowels are generally thought of as being points in a three-dimensional space. The dimensions are:

1. Whether the vowel is high or low -- if your mouth opens wide (chin closer to feet), it's a lower vowel; if your mouth doesn't open far (chin closer to eyes), it's a higher vowel.

2. Whether the vowel is front or back. The traditional way to explain this to linguistics students is to give them all lollipops. You put the lollipop on the middle of your tongue with the stick jutting out of your mouth. You can observe that the stick juts farther forward when you're pronouncing the FLEECE vowel than it does when you're pronouncing the GOOSE vowel.

3. Whether, as you pronounce the vowel, your lips are rounded or not.

Dutch "ui" is a diphthong, a transition from one vowel to another vowel. It appears to be a transition from (lowish, front, rounded) to (high, front, rounded). This is difficult for English because, in English, all front vowels are unrounded.

If you'd like to preserve the lip-rounding aspect of "ui", you need to use back vowels, at which point the MOUTH vowel is a near-perfect (low, back, xx[1]) -> (high, back, rounded) match.

If you'd like to preserve the frontness of "ui", the English FACE vowel is available, which is a transition from (lowish, front, unrounded) to (high, front, unrounded). CHOICE is a different option; it's (lowish, back, rounded) -> (high, front, unrounded). With CHOICE, you're choosing to match the rounding (and not the frontness) of the beginning of "ui", but transition into an end that matches frontness instead of rounding.

Which part of a sound is more important for purposes of matching a foreign sound to a native sound is a very interesting question, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has any idea why different languages make the choices they do. My (American) ears think the MOUTH vowel is the best match for Dutch "ui", even though it's an even better match for Dutch "ou". But someone else might disagree.

For an example of "differential splitting", consider that in modern English, W, V, and F are three separate sounds. In Old English, W and F were "real" sounds ("phonemes"), and V was a variety ("allophone") of F. In modern Mandarin Chinese, W and F are also phonemes, and V is an allophone of... W. Clearly, if you speak modern Mandarin, what's important about the V sound is not the same thing that would be important if you spoke Old English.

[1] Rounding is less obvious for low vowels -- a certain amount of lip rounding is induced by opening your mouth so far.

That sentence is more ambiguous in English than you might think! I'm curious which of these meanings are compatible with the Dutch:

1. The only thing I do in my checkered kitchen is eat fried onions. (Other activities don't take place in the checkered kitchen.)

2. Fried onions are the only thing I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Other foods must be eaten elsewhere.)

3. Fried onions are the only type of onion I eat in my checkered kitchen. (Raw onions must be eaten elsewhere, but eating steak in the kitchen is OK.)

4. My checkered kitchen is the only place in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak anywhere, but I won't eat fried onions outside the kitchen.)

5. My checkered kitchen is the only one of my kitchens in which I eat fried onions. (I'll eat steak in any kitchen, but I won't eat fried onions in my plain white kitchen.)

6. My checkered kitchen is the only checkered kitchen in which I will eat fried onions. (I won't eat fried onions in your checkered kitchen, but I will eat them in the bedroom.)