once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.
Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.
So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!
"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.
This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!
Individual language sounds are called phonemes by the way! Most languages have 20-50 different phonemes, though some have as few as 10 and some people count tonal languages like Mandarin as having over 200. English has 44.
The human brain learns to differentiate between phonemes in childhood, so if you weren't exposed to stuff like retroflex consonants as a kid you literally can't hear them yet! It's not your fault but it will take work to teach yourself how to hear and speak them. Foreign music, radio, and film are great for learning to hear new phonemes.
Additionally: marking what phonemes are distinct in a language is called "minimal pairs". Meaning, if you changed this phoneme for another, would the meaning of the word change? Generally, if your language doesn't include the phoneme as a minimal pair, you will have significant trouble being able to hear or make that sound. Like anything else, it can be trained, but it is not so simple as "just do it"/"just look it up".
For example, in English, you don't use the sound ɐ̃ (as in pão). I have yet to meet a native English speaker who can make that sound, usually they just default to a plain a. Even though, in Portuguese, pau (pau) and pão (pɐ̃ũ) are completely different words.
The name of the country Kiribati (kɪrɪbæs) is derived from the surname Gilberts. As in, it is literally the Gilbertese pronunciation of Gilberts. Because their language lacks phonemes for G/L, the name uses the best approximation possible.
Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't try, but just be aware that your Nguyen is probably not the way that it's actually pronounced, and an effort/your best shot is worth a lot. And if someone wants to use a different or 'Westernized' name just fucking go with it.
I forgot to mention in that first reblog: there are over 800 phonemes worldwide! Humans can pronounce around 600 different consonant sounds and 200 different vowel sounds.
Also, the reason English is such a nightmare to pronounce/spell phonetically is because we have 44 phonemes but only 26 letters. Most languages with a written alphabet have one specific letter or letter combination for each phoneme but we don't.
For any given language combination, there's likely to only be a couple sounds that you will never be able to hear, but there are often countless that you can't hear yet. There are countless phenomic rules in your language that contradict with the other language. "Why is that so hard?? [Your native language] has that sound!" Yes, but it cannot put it at the end of a word with no vowel behind it. Yes, but it cannot be combined with that next consonant. You can't hear these well enough to reproduce them either, until you can. And that will take a lot more familiarity than the time it takes to look up a pronunciation, and training of your mouth to reproduce it.
And that's if you can actually, accurately find consistent answers when you do look it up. My own home county and its towns are mispronounced frequently on the local news and weather. They're getting that shit wrong one single county away.
If you're listening to someone mispronounce your native language, you might not even be able to accurately diagnose what the other person did wrong. Sometimes people will claim some phoneme was mispronounced when the problem was the stress was so wildly incorrect that that part of the word sounded wrong, so you assumed it was the phoneme itself. If a native speaker can't correct it, how is are people supposed to figure out the correct pronunciation themselves?
When people act like this is an English speaker only problem, they're telling on themselves. You're either not noticing when this happens in other languages, or you're not listening to other languages at all. Which isn't something to be ashamed of, until you're shaming people for being monolingual. I promise people are pulling the same "I hope I'm saying that right" in other languages. Are adding sounds they don't even hear themselves adding. Are saying something almost correct and then correcting themselves to something wildly wrong.
Here on Tumblr specifically people like to pretend it's a monolingual English speaker only problem. But they're still perpetuating ideas that it's simply a matter of effort and intellect, and you know who that hurts most in the English speaking world? People who speak English as a second language.
