How to Pronounce Chinese Names a Little Better

Nice to have a quick and dirty pronunciation guide for this.

Interesting how useless transliteration can be unless the reader is familiar with the system. Naiively applying conventional pronunciation rules to transliterated words can yield mixed results.

Russian is kind of similar, though not as extreme as Mandarin. For example, most English speakers pronounce Khrushchev as "kroosh-chev" because that's how it reads if you're used to English spelling rules. But a more accurate (though still wrong) pronunciation would be more like "Hrooshoff" with a phlegm on the H and a rolled R if you can do it.

But getting to that pronunciation in the first place requires knowing that kh is Х, that shch is щ, and that the e is actually a ё (which is a separate letter from е in Russian, but the dots are frequently omitted because speakers of the language know which е's are е's and which are ё).

I've always wondered why the Romanized transliteration of Mandarin doesn't map normally to conventions used in the Latin letter-using world. For whom was it designed, then? This makes no more sense than Sinofying English by using Chinese characters to somehow represent different sounds than they normally would to a Mandarin speaker.

Together, I and U get a tad complicated. "iu" is pronounced like "iou" (Yo!), and "ui" is pronounced like "uei" (Way!).