LogFAQs > #978734120

Robot2600 posted...

To be devils advocate for a bit... it's not about Americans not "knowing hot to make the sound" as much as it is that the sound just isn't differentiated at all in English. it sounds the same to us because of how brains get wired. some aspects of a first language will NEVER go away, even with virtuosic fluency.

it's why a nature spanish speaker will often say "estudent" for "student" and a fracophone will say "ze" for "the"

it's not something most people will every really learn. some people can get rid of accents, some just can't, so you shouldn't expect that non native vietnamese speakers will ever be able to pronounce it correctly.

and that's true if you think about names translating between languages anyway. My name changes pronunciation in English, French, and Japanese. It would be unfair to say a Japanese speaker is pronouncing my name wrong when those sounds don't exist in Japanese.

all that said, it's not that hard to add a little "Hnng" sound at the beginning of "when", like "Gwen" but without any "g" sounds if you really want to show off. In linguistics that ng sound is called a voiced velar nasal. again this is all but impossible unless you have basic training in linguistics. To someone else it should SOUND like "when" but to you, the speaker, you should be able to feel that you are using your nasal passage to make the "ng" sound at the beginning.

also literally everyone should know to pronounce "Nguyen" as something like "When" or "win"

I'm not a linguist like you, so I'll admit I don't know more about languages than you but I only go for anecdotal evidence and from what I've seen anytime I try to have an English speaker try to pronounce the "ng" part correctly, it never really registers for them and I think because there's no English word that starts with a "Ng" which makes sense. The only time a "ng" is ever together is a "ing" ending at the end of a word. So I basically tell them that "nuh-win" or "win" works just fine.

But I do appareciate the word "Hnng" as a good word to use as reference to get people to say the word "correctly". I might try that on my coworker to see if that will help him say my last name "correctly". And I say "correctly" because even I get criticize for saying some Vietnamese words wrong because both my parents are from the North so they say Vietnamese words in an unpopular dialect way. Which is why I don't take issue if people can't say a word correctly, because I would be the biggest hypocrite of them all.