Nguyen

Pronouncing this name right is a Nguyen Nguyen situation | News.com.au:

So how to say it properly and impress your Vietnamese friends? It’s actually not that hard. The first thing you have to do is get your head around the “ng”.
In English, we only have the “ng” sound at the end of words like “thing” or “song”. In Vietnamese, they often use that sound at the beginning of words.
So pretend you’re saying the word “thing”. Now hold onto that end bit. Say it a few times. “Ng”. “Ng”. Get ready to start a word with it.
OK, that’s the tricky part. Now all you have to deal with is the “uyen”.
Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means a native speaker would pronounce the “uy” musically with a downwards inflection, then dip back up again on the “en”.
We’ll let you off that. All you need to do is run the “uy” and the “en” together so that they make a sound almost identical to the English word “win”.
Imagine you follow the Geelong Cats but you missed the game on the weekend. You ask your friend “Did Geelong win?”.
The secret is in the end of that sentence. Say the last five letters again, and say them as one syllable “ngwin”.

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