Fire Haired14
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Why can't people set aside 5 minutes to learn to pronounce only their own surname? That is unbelievable. The time you spent replying to my posts you would have had time to remember spelling conventions in at least 5 languages!
It certainly takes a lot longer than 5 minutes.
It does happen, for example with North African immigrants in Europe, who still use Arabic given names after 3 generations in Europe. In contrast, people like people translate their given name even when studying for a few months in another European country, to 'go native' as much as possible.
How have Middle Easterners who have lived in Europe for generations integrated?
Read what I wrote above.: The ultimate rule for Americans with foreign names should be: if you can't pronounce it, change it to an English name. It's better than to sound like a fool who can't pronounce his/her own name properly.
The only people we sound like fools to are native speakers who makeup 0.0000001% of the population in America.
Did you know that in Japan any foreigners who applies to Japanese citizenship is required by law to choose a Japanese given name and surname? That's because Japanese language has very few vowels and consonants and it makes it very difficult for Japanese people to pronounce foreign names. As they don't like to butcher foreign pronunciation, as many sounds cannot be accurately rendered using Japanese script (Katakana in this case), they decided it would be better for everyone if naturalised citizens adopted Japanese names. I have permanent resident status in Japan and once considered naturalisation, but Japan does not allow dual citizenship and I simply could not give up my EU citizenship.
That's interesting but it shouldn't be done in America. Yeah, sure maybe we should learn to say some names. We can do that name by name. An example of that is Mike Krzyzewski. We don't pronounce his name with English spelling rules because his family taught people how to pronounce it. But we don't need to take "take 5 minutes" to learn another language's spelling and pronouncation in order to know how to pronounce any Polish name other than Krzyzewski.
And no people don't totally butch those celebrities' names. We pronounce them slightly incorrectly. It's not a big deal.