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Comment by strozykowski | Hacker News Reader

As a bearer of an apparently hard-to-pronounce name, this looks interesting, but I don't know that I would do this.

Another -ski here. Sometimes there's room for varying pronunciations of the same name. I grew up pronouncing my last name the way my non-English speaking parents thought it should be pronounced in English. It wasn't until college that I realized there was an easier way to pronounce it.

If it's the same name as your HN username, I don't see any obvious way to mispronounce it, other than whether the first 'o' is long or short. Is that the bit people mispronounce?

I'm guessing any pronunciation errors are caused by people misreading it and skipping letters or adding extra ones.

This is pretty close to what happens. It's generally phonetic, and yet there seems to be a wide variety of first pronunciations, which deviate from the phonetic by several syllables either way.

My Polish friends tell me that speaking in Polish "ow" is pronounced like the English word "off" (or maybe "of"? I forget) instead of the English word "ow". So "off-ski" or "uv-ski" instead of "ow-ski", at least for some of them.

Same here (Polish names unite!). I usually get embarrassed by the amount of attention mine will get. Using this tool feels like it would just add even more attention to it.

My last name is actually simple to pronounce but I usually ask to "just call me Greg", as Grzegorz is probably the epitome of unpronounceable Polish names.

Still, I'm not sure if I'd ever use this tool. Seems somewhat pretentious, even if useful.

Maybe it's a cultural difference? I can almost see people in the States use this, but anyone in Poland would be laughed off.

Probably.

If you're Polish and you see a Polish name, you instantly know how to pronounce it. In the US It's more more hit-or-miss due to ethnical diversity and the English language itself.

Come to think of it, I'd like other people to use this site, but still wouldn't use it myself. Maybe it's because so far I can't see a way to mispronounce my last name and I've essentially given up on my first name.

The ultimate challenge: Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

Pronounced "author of Flow"

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