Pronunciation – How to Pronounce ‘Friends’?

Consonant clusters like this are not all that comfortable for native English speakers either. Carefully pronouncing all the consonants is more work than it's worth, and actually sounds unnatural. Usually there is some degree of elision. Each speaker evolves a personal, 'idiolectal' approach; but there are a couple of general tendencies which make these word-final clusters easier.

• The final consonant is 'carried over' to head the following syllable if this results in an acceptable syllable head. In your example, for instance, the collocation tufts out is read as if it were tuft sout. The cluster /st/ is a frequent syllable head, so the word Borstal is spoken Bor stal. Occasionally this will involve eliding the beginning of the following syllable: tufts had, for instance, would be spoken as tuft sad.

• Stops (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/) which close a syllable or occur before a consonant are not aspirated, and if a following consonant has the same point of articulation they virtually disappear. In your example, /t/ and /s/ have the same point of articulation, and the /t/ is discernible only as a slight sharpening of the attack on the /s/ -- which, as said, heads the following syllable. There's not even a complete closure of the airflow, only a slightly marked narrowing: /tuf-sout/. (I have no idea how the IPA represents this.) This will be true at the end of a sentence, too, where there's no carryover: He pulled his hair out in tufts .. /tuf-s/

The most useful thing to keep in mind is that people don't speak in words but 'utterances', and they will redistribute the word boundaries to suit established oral patterns.

As a native speaker, I definitely say the whole consonant cluster as written, even in very fast speech ( i.e. /siksθ/ in IPA).

I tried saying it to myself out loud just now omitting the second s sound, so /sikθ/, and it sounded really strange, like I was trying to make fun of someone with a lisp saying the number six. I would not recommend that shortcut.

On the other hand I tried /sikst/ and found it inoffensive (and hard to notice a difference), so I would recommend that if you find /siksθ/ hard to produce.