If you can learn how to pronounce Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, you can learn how to pronounce SungWon
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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Thing is I can pronounce Japanese names fine because they use a very similar structure and phonetics to English ones. A Czech name? A polish name? Those letters apparently don’t make the same sounds as in my language, and it fucks with my head.
Cant comment on Swahili, it’s not come up yet.
Would you rather have someone: confidently fail to pronounce your name, slowly attempt to pronouce your name unconfidently, or not even try to pronounce it?
You just can’t pronounce sounds that aren’t in your native language without training. I’m Ukrainian, and my legal name, “Zelenskyy” and “Kyiv” all have [ɪ] in them, which means none of you pronounce them correctly. I have once tried to teach an Anglophone to pronounce that sound, and my most useful advice was “imagine you got hit in the stomach”. For this and few more reasons, basically no Ukrainian name or toponym is pronounced correctly in English media, ever, and this can’t be fixed by just briefing on how to pronounce stuff, you’ll have to train your mouth to produce a new vowel and probably more.
In Ukrainian we just accept that every word has Ukrainian pronunciation and its native pronunciation, and that includes names. I don’t know how you ended up with idea that picking up pronunciation from another language is something that can be done trivially upon introduction, but that’s not how human vocal apparatus works.
See, in my brain I go “I’ll butcher the fuck out of this no matter what, but dammit I’m gonna try” and in my Southern-ass accent, man it comes out racist as hell
Ah yes, the linguistic Olympics—training for Polish surnames preps you for anything.
Something a lot of people seem to miss is that everyone has a limited phoneme library. Your brain literally discards certain sounds if you don’t hear them growing up, and it can be hard to learn to distinguish them. It can sometimes be literally impossible for people to pronounce a name that has phonemes in it their first language doesn’t.
That said, you can usually use your native phonemes to approximate most surnames, and *trying* but getting it wrong is more respectful than giving up without bothering!
… Also, how on Earth do people find Japanese names hard to pronounce? The language has like 26 phonemes, if you’re being generous, and most of them are really easy if you speak English.
Is that racist? I feel like it’s more about them not wanting to completely butcher someones name.
tf2 players cant even pronounce Claidheamh Mòr when it’s right on the wiki page and it’s coming up on 15 years
This is my partner and I. His is Polish and mine Irish and we’re going double barreled when we get married, think Bieszczad- Bhraonáin. The only times either of us get annoyed about misspellings are on official documents and we joke that by getting married we are actually making things more difficult for people.
It’s not that deep, some languages especially Irish and Polish are hard for English speakers (and Irish to Polish speakers and vice versa) to pronounce and there are subtleties in pronunciation and cadence that you literally can’t *hear* if you don’t speak a language. My partner and I kind of pronounce eachothers surnames wrong still due to our different accents!!
“So Sung, like the past tense of sing, and then won, like you won the race”
“Soog Win?”
I’m an American living in Spain and I have a normal name for English, but it’s not a super common like John or something, and it has a consonant cluster and two vowels that don’t exist in Spanish, so Spaniards have *no fucking clue* how to say my name. When I introduce myself to people, especially older people, there’s always *always* at least one moment of pure bewilderment on their faces before I repeat it again and they either accept it and move on or continue to look absolutely baffled. When I go places that ask for a name (like Starbucks or making a reservation at a restaurant) I just give them a Spanish name. At the doctor’s, when they call my name, I have to be ready to expect anything at all to come out of their mouths, because I’ve heard every variation and other completely invented combination before.
But I mean, I don’t blame them. If it’s a one-off moment like the doctor’s or Starbucks, I don’t expect them to say it right. Even if it’s like a party where I’m meeting someone I know I’m never talking to again, I don’t expect them to sit there and try to learn how to say my name right (unless they want to, which some people do).
Anyway, I thought my experience was at least tangentially related to the meme in question.
I don’t really think any of that is racism, its not racist to not know other languages and be incapable of pronouncing them without being self conscious
So if English speakers are doing it to people regardless of race, how is it racist?
It’s not an especially surprising idea that someone would struggle to pronounce an unfamiliar foreign word. Would people genuinely prefer a confident mispronunciation to someone admitting they don’t know how to pronounce their name?
I can’t even pronounce strange English names, because English is an inherently inconsistent language and with names especially, why in the world would I assume that I understand how to pronounce another languages name!?
A language like French has a bunch of very specific rules like silencing certain letters and French is a romance language! If I don’t know the language rules then why would I assume I know how to pronounce it?
Saying I’m not going to try to pronounce it is not me being lazy or racist somehow, it’s me not knowing the rules, do you know how to program? Then you not trying to program is clearly racist!
my first name, middle name, and surname have rolled R’s. Almost all english natives physically can’t pronounce them correctly, I’ve made peace with just giving the anglicised versions to spare my ears.
Yes you should ask and make an effort, but some romanization systems are absolute dogshit.
Japanese isn’t too bad. Korean is ok except no one will pronounce eo/어 correctly and the double consonants will just confuse people. Pinyin is only comprehensible if you’ve learned it.
Welsh? I only know enough to know I’m going to be wrong.
Learning new sounds is hard man.
I am Greek, unless we’ve been demoted to non white again then I don’t want to hear how it’s racism
Exactly, people don’t bother to learn to pronounce Eastern European names either. Or even non-english European names in general. “Arnold Sworzunegger”?
I think it’s completely normal and fine not to be able to pronounce a foreign name, especially if you’ve never encountered it before or only ever seen it in text.
It does bother me when youtubers do that shit though… “I’m not even going to try and pronounce that, haha 🤪” yet they chose to talk about this specific topic/person themselves and had all the time in the world to look up how to say the word correctly.
As a person with a Polish name that makes no sense to anyone outside eastern Europe, calling it racism when people say “I’m not even gonna try” is fucking *wild*.
Most of the time those people are actually trying to avoid offending you by mispronouncing your name, which they obviously recognize they don’t know how to do.
Stop trying to be angry at everything, Christ.
Racism is when you don’t try to pronounce names you’re unfamiliar with incorrectly
The thing is, not every language uses the same sounds. And if you grew up never using some sounds, you simply do not know how to make the correct sounds.
Note: I agree with OOP. Many people do not even make an attempt to pronounce names correctly.
I never hear English speakers try to pronounce Durch surnames properly yeah, I didn’t actually recognize people were talking about van Gogh the first time I heard English speakers do that.
But it’s understandable as usually they cant pronounce the Dutch G
And it’s Indian names that seem to give Westerners a rough time in particular.
How is it definitely racist? People admitting they struggle with another language shouldn’t be discouraged, humility is good.
Also, who the hell knows how to pronounce… Whatever is the first name in the title but can’t do SungWon?