My wife is from Thailand so I spend a lot of time in Thailand and with Thai people. My name is Robert which is difficult for Thai people to say. So I got by Bob

My wife is from Thailand so I spend a lot of time in Thailand and with Thai people. My name is Robert which is difficult for Thai people to say. So I got by Bob with Thais despite never going by it in any other context. I don’t expect Thai people to be able to make sounds (R’s in particular) that aren’t commonly used in their language. (There is an R sound in Thai, but it has a roll, and is commonly pronounced as an L sound regardless) Likewise we don’t expect English speakers (or Chinese Spanish French German or any other language) to be able to say her Pali name. (In Thailand they use Pali, the dead language used in the Buddhist canon, for names) She also has a Thai language nickname as all Thais do, but it’s challenging and so she decided to adopt a simpler English name among native English speakers upon arrival. I think it’s laudable to try to pronounce names in every language across all of humanity with alacrity, but it’s unreasonable to expect everyone can and will. Certainly in my travels there’s a great deal less sensitivity to other languages and cultures than we seem to expect in the US and to some extent in parts of Europe. It’s an unreasonable standard. However in some contexts, particularly roles of trust and respect, you should always ask and try, and I think in general it’s a polite human thing to do. But any expectation of success and remembering is completely unreasonable. In the first case, the brain just isn’t adapted to the sounds no matter how much they respect you and your culture. The second case, it’s like memorizing random nonsense words - it’s not nonsense to you, but to the person who grew up in a totally different culture and language, it certainly is. That’s not disrespectful, that’s a simple fact of reality. IMO the disrespectful thing is to be upset with humans being human - the attempt is the act of respect - anything beyond that is a measure of some intellectual capability that not everyone has.