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It sounds sort of like "Jong" or "Chang" with the a sound from Spanish not the a in "cat", but most Americans pronounce it like zang rhymes with tang, and mostl
by earthboundkid 3y ago
It sounds sort of like "Jong" or "Chang" with the a sound from Spanish not the a in "cat", but most Americans pronounce it like zang rhymes with tang, and mostly no one complains about it. I had a Chinese American friend who mostly introduced herself with the wrong pronunciation but after we talked about it, I saw her do an introduction with the right pronunciation. It's a hard problem because there's very little sound overlap between English and Mandarin, and this is made worse by using Pinyin spelling, which is designed for use by native speakers and not English speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_(surname) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_(surname)
One solution would be to translate it to Archer. :-)
- amluto 3y agoI can’t make heads or tails of this, since Chinese pronunciation and romanized spelling is all over the map. If the name is expected to be read as Mandarin (which is reasonably likely but not at all certain), written in Pinyin (which is likely), then, with a mild Taiwanese Mandarin accent, it would be fairly close to “jaw” but with an ng sound at the end instead of a w. If it’s pronounced with an accent from closer to Beijing, then the initial consonant would be retroflexed, which doesn’t occur in English. It sounds a bit like “zhrrrr” where the “zh” part is somewhat similar to the j in jaw. If it’s a stronger Taiwanese accent, the initial consonant could be more like “dz”. But it could be something else entirely. Then there’s the tone, and the tone mark is missing entirely. It’s highly unlikely that this means it’s 5th-tone (as it would be if it were real Pinyin), and it’s probably first tone in this case. You can find guides online.