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!
ellievsbear
origamiaround
stormborns
snowghoul
tangentwithtanner
