#and her tactic is to just lecture them to death about foreign phonics until they get it right

[2030kamenriders]

(about the previous post I reblogged).

So a really big thing about me (which is much more obvious if you know me in real life, and thus know my real name) is that I have issues with people mispronouncing it.

A lot of my siblings have to deal with this, simply because of growing up as the kids of immigrants in a mostly-white town, and having very "not-white" names. We all deal with it in different ways.

This was the source of most of my issues in Kindergarten. It's one understandable thing when the other kids can't say your name (after all, they're still developing their talking abilities). But it's a very different thing when you tell them a hundred times how to say your name (in a way that should be easy enough, you would think), and they keep on butchering it beyond recognition.

To be fair, my name has certain letter-sounds that don't actually exist in English. As a result, depending on what accent you are hearing it from, it sounds kinda like one of 2 English letters, or a mix of the two (although really, it's kind of a completely different category of sound). So as long as the person is pronouncing the rest of the name accurately, it's alright.

However, because of me going easier in that regard, I get really, really bugged when people still ask for some sort of short form or more English-ified nickname or something. Like, buddy, I already told you that nickname. It's what I just introduced myself as: (insert my real name but with a heavy north-american accent here).

And then I also get bugged when people of the same cultural background as me use the "most English-ified" pronunciation. I know for a fact that they can say it properly. Why aren't they?

And then I get these really difficult-to-explain feelings when I meet someone who does actually end up saying it right. You know, it's that feeling when the substitute teacher apologizes in advance, but still manages to pronounce your name perfectly on the first try during attendance. Or when you and your siblings have a mutual friend, and the friend finds out how to say your name properly from your sibling, and seems genuinely sad that I didn't correct them earlier.

Anyway, I guess this is all part of why I've gotten really attached to the nickname 2030 here. You can't mispronounce the letters when there are no letters to mispronounce.