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Comment by CocaKoala | Hacker News Reader

I dunno; as somebody who's name gets mispronounced essentially all the time, I'm pretty sensitive about trying to pronounce other people's names properly. If they embed the pronunciation in their email, then a) I don't have to ask, and b) I can practice on my own time with a reference to make sure I have it correct. It's nice of them.

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My name gets mispronounced, too, and I'm fine with it - I actually prefer the incorrectly pronounced version of my name.

It has taught me, though, that when someone tells you "you can just call me X", you should not keep asking them how to really pronounce their name. If you're an American, you are not going to be able to fluently pronounce some non-Indo-European names. It's downright rude to quiz people for minutes on end as to how their name is "really" pronounced. If you don't get it on the second try, just go with what they're comfortable with.

My name has a difficult spelling, and an easy pronunciation. I think I will be looking into this service.

> non-Indo-European names

Are Persian or Polish names easier than Hawaiian or Japanese?

German names are hard enough for monolingual English speakers.

Yet to encounter a monolingual English speaker to be able to pronounce my first name "Ward" (Dutch speaking Belgian). Only one I know of was someone who had spent several years in Paris (so he knew French and wasn't actually in the monolingual category anymore).

I recorded this one several years ago: http://wardje.eu/dll/ward.wav

Let's not even get started on my last name...

Wow, yup, that would definitely... take some practice to get right.

I did something similar on YouTube, specifying the way I prefer Americans to pronounce my name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfTkEaZSMXo

I agree, but I'll add that a minor variant of that "you can call me either X or Y" is really annoying, because in my experience "it doesn't matter to me" is almost never actually true. I see this a lot with students; they think they're doing me a favour by giving me a choice, but they do prefer one of them, and their friends call them one of them, and I end up looking like an asshole for using some other form of their name.

To avoid the appearance of that, it would be nice if instead of "you can just call me X"---which sounds like it's your less-preferred alternative, your second choice, so obviously someone's going to try for the other one---you said "please call me X" or "I prefer if you call me X". Then everybody wins! :)

Yeah, I actually don't care if people mispronounce my name at all, but I really dislike mispronouncing other peoples' names, and I also really dislike putting other people in the position to struggle with the pronunciation, then if they get it wrong, I'm in the awkward position of either correcting them and causing them to feel bad about something I don't care about or (for people with whom I will be having an ongoing relationship), let them continue mispronouncing my name until they hear someone else (potentially me), pronounce it correctly (potentially making them feel even worse for all the times they made the mistake). It would certainly be nice to have a database of names and pronunciations.

That said, this does not seem like an ideal solution to me, because it sorta has some of the same problems that just telling people how your name is pronounced has - makes it seem like a bigger deal than it actually is, possibly won't work anyway, etc. Name pronunciation is probably just a bad situation in general.

Yeah, for sure this is probably not the be-all-end-all solution to the problem of mispronounced names; I'm guessing that it's trying to be the email equivalent of introducing yourself (and thus providing the proper pronunciation so people have it), but it's not quite the seamless marriage of sound and text that I think people are hoping for.

I have a different problem, my name Jensen generally gets said correctly but people looking at the spelling of my name get it wrong (Jenson / Jason) quite frequently.

This is primarily an issue with new contacts / acquaintances which I'm sure looks poorly on both of us, especially when this gets sent to other people on job searches etc.

I can think of two pronunciations for Jensen, but nationality would probably be enough to narrow it down.

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