Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems incomprehensible for english speakers because of the sheer amount of consonants though it actually flows quite nicely if you know the rules<p>&#x27;sz&#x27;, &#x27;cz&#x27; - those are equivalent to &#x27;sh&#x27; (shop,shell) and &#x27;ch&#x27; (chop, check)<p>&#x27;w&#x27; - it&#x27;s a hard &#x27;v&#x27; as in &#x27;very&#x27;, &#x27;vary&#x27;. Always, no exceptions and never anything else, it&#x27;s Ko-v-alski (Kowalski) and Le-v-ando-v-ski (Lewandowski). This is, I think, the most common mistake when reading polish names because english speakers often soften the &#x27;w&#x27; to english &#x27;w&#x27; as in &#x27;when&#x27;&#x2F;&#x27;why&#x27;<p>&#x27;Ł or ł&#x27; - that&#x27;s the thing you think of when you see &#x27;w&#x27; in english. It&#x27;s the same sound as in &#x27;when&#x27;&#x2F;&#x27;why&#x27;&#x2F;&#x27;when&#x27;. It&#x27;s not a weird accent on &#x27;L&#x27;, for some reason we don&#x27;t have &#x27;v&#x27; in our alphabet and we moved &#x27;v&#x27; sound to &#x27;w&#x27; and &#x27;w&#x27; sound to &#x27;ł&#x27;<p>ó - it&#x27;s called &#x27;closed u&#x27;, the same as normal, open u, pronounced as in &#x27;put&#x27;&#x2F;&#x27;dude&#x27;. The only difference between open and closed &#x27;u&#x27; is in writing, none in speaking<p>y - a vowel, I don&#x27;t think the sound exists in english but often &#x27;yyyyyy...&#x27; in polish is used as &#x27;ummmmm...&#x27; in english<p>ą, ć, ę, ń, ś, ź, ż - good luck ;)<p>One thing that makes polish a bit easier is that it&#x27;s pronunciation is 98% consistent, you need to learn the sound of each letter or digraph once and it will never change so every polish person will pronounce even made-up words in the same way because there&#x27;s only one way (you may write it incorrectly as in the open&#x2F;closed u above, or ż&#x2F;rz, but you will read it back correctly so just don&#x27;t show anyone how you&#x27;ve written it :) )