Comradeship // Freechat

After some googling, I found this:

ć: A soft ty sound as in "Katya" or "feature"; occurs nearly exclusively in the combination ić at the end of family names. F Radić, Pavelić, Ranković, Milošević.

How do you expect people to know how to pronounce this without having studied the language before hand? It's a pretty stupid thing to be angry about. People are raised with native language(s) and they can't pronounce sounds or combinations of sounds not found in them without some training.

Japanese is easier to pronounce for English speakers, because it consists of simple syllables that map almost 1:1 with English ones. And people still mess up pronunciations, because of course they would, that's how languages work, unfortunately.

It also helps that some Japanese words appear in English as their phonetic pronunciation and not their literal transliteration. E.g. tofu is actually written 'toufu' in hiragana, with 'ou' being a long 'o' sound.

To pronounce a foreign name correctly basically means to know the phonetics and orthography of that language. Pretty much no one dedicates that kind of effort. English speakers regularly mispronounce Hispanic names too and Spanish has totally unambiguous spelling.

Also, only weebs get Japanese names right consistently.

Easy, because Japanese has a much easier Romanized written form to read and pronounce generally than with other languages. It's not western speaker's fault if they have an easier way to interpret one language over another. Maybe for you Japanese names seem harder because your native language makes Japanese hard, but it's not the case for many westerners because Romanized Japanese is more understandable to them than it may be for you

Because the Japanese names are written phonetically in the Latin script and the nature of the English language means that pronunciation is a guessing game due to a lack of accents/tonal marks. You’re angry at the wrong people OP. It’s the script and language that causes this frustration, not the people per se. It happens with names from other parts of the world that are transcribed into the Latin script.

its mostly anglophones and francophones imo, since it is very hard for them because their language has a very strong accent. but also they dont even try most of the time. in german television at least they train to pronounce every foreign name correctly, doesnt matter where from, but they pronounce it so correctly that it almost sounds weird at times, i dont know how to explain it. i think the romanized transliteration also plays a big part, becuase mostly asian languages are transliterared in a way how you would write it in english, while slavic names either are in roman letters and dont get transliterated or just change the cyrillic with latin letters. I think it would be better if we would actually write russian Josef as Iosif in english, because that would imply a different pronounciation, while Josef is just a translation of the name Iosif.

Part of the issue is most keyboards in America don’t have keys to add accent marks. macOS has Option keys, iOS has the long-press popups, and Linux has dead keys, but on Windows (the vast majority of the market), you still have to bang open Character Map or memorize numeric codes to get accented letters. Sure, you can get an international keyboard for your desktop, but most people won’t, and if you have a laptop, swapping the keyboard is significantly harder.

I wanted to correct someone’s last name in our system, changing Munoz to Muñoz. It took me a good minute to get that ñ in there. Not that most of my coworkers know how to pronounce that, mind you.

I studied Spanish in high school. That has relatively few accent marks and diacritics compared to the Eastern European languages, which was not an option at all in high school and still something I barely know.

Now, enough ranting. Are there any quick videos or tutorials for learning how to pronounce some of these letters in the various languages?

Anglos used to butchering everything, from people to languages.