Can English-speaking people pronounce your name properly?

my surname is never pronounced correctly... people either leave it out all together when addressing me, or try their best at pronouncing it (it's a Czech surname). I think i've heard all possible attempts at the pronounciation...

My Chinese name is pronounced Chit-hei. (in Cantonese). Or Zhe Xi. (in Mandarin). People can't really pronounce the latter. Oh and my surname is quite similar in sound too, just to add to the confusion.

Then when I was young, my parents decided to give me a totally different English name, to save the confusion.

But to be honest, I'm not really bothered if people pronounce it wrong. It's not their fault that my name isn't exactly a common one they'd come across.

i'm american. they speak engish (or a version of it) in my country and no one can pronouce it. its jo-vana. the a is long as in ahhh. i get jo-vana with the a like ana a lot. or the italian giovanna. and the spelling is worse. i get joanna, jovannah, jovanna, etc....its pronouced just how its spelled, i don't know why its so difficult.

No, I pretty much agree with all you said (waits to be burnt alive). Just one example: my housemate Babar was from Pakistan and would try and impress on everyone 'Bab-ir' not 'Bah-bah'. After a few awkward repetitions my Irish and Scottish housies and I got it but the English and Americans plain wouldn't. He confided he was really fed up of how nobody here would bother getting his name right, only the people from the 'welsh, irish and scottish parts of england' (which totally ruined our brief bond lol)

Sounds like I'm being really mean but like I said it's from experience, I have such a job getting English people to pronounce my name right, God knows why it's simple. I'm in a Welsh uni and every English person here makes no effort to pronounce any of the places right, yet the Irish/Scottish/european people I've met have. I study langs too and noticed most of the English classmates found the 'j' sound hard to pronounce, or just left it as a 'h'. Drove my (very scary Argentinian) teacher up the wall.

I really wanted to do research into this as part of the linguistics course I was studying (got discontinued grr), cause it's really interesting. My prof at the time explained to me about muscles in the mouth and stuff and how standard English RP speakers, especially those not exposed to any other languages, used one set of muscles whereas people with other (in this case Welsh) accents used different ones, finding pronunciation of foreign words easier. I don't know, it was a really interesting theory anyway.

Sorry if I sound like a complete arse there I didn't mean to. Wasn't trying to say 'oh we're better than you' - really not!!! Just going on experience and interesting quirks I've noticed, and not trying to say everyone's like that.

Oh I'm poo at expressing myself...



I live near a place called Castell Coch ('K-awe-ch', using the 'ch' as in 'loch') and it was mentioned on Antiques Roadshow once where this guy had a chair from there and the dealer goes 'Have you ever visited Castle Cock?'