11/5    What's the right pronunciation of Ngyuen? Gwen? New-Yen?
        \_ You can't make that sound without practice. Nyen is close.
        \_ You can't make that sound without practice. Nwin is close.
           \_ Ok, can a Vietnamese native speaker record a correct
              pronunciation (.wav or something) and post it in /csua/tmp?
              Curious people want to know...
           \_ I've always pronounced it closer to new-wen.
              \_ And your first language was what?
              \_ It is definitately only one syllable, no matter how you say it.
                 I think you mean Nguyen, right?
                 \_ bah, the first guy was right Nwin is how you say it
                    \_ I once knew a girl with that name who insisted
                       it was pronounced "nu-yin".
                       \_ that's cuz you she didn't want you in her pants
                    \_ I searched Yahoo and found both Nguyen and Ngyuen.  Are
                       they equivalent?  Or are they both correct but different
                       last names?
        \_ Yeah and what about Ng? Is that "ing"? If so why not spell it that
           way in the goddam first place? For that matter why would someone
           write a name "Hsiao", I mean it sure wasn't written that way in
           China so why not just write it phonetically?
        \_ The name is Nguyen.  It is the most common Vietnamese last
           name, much more common than Smith is here, and was the name of
           a series of emperors, the Nguyen Dynasty.  "Nguyen" is the
           Anglisized spelling.  In Vietnamese, there's a circumflex (^)
           over the "e" and a tilde (~) over the circumflex.  I've never
           heard of Ngyuen before.  That doesn't mean it's not a name, but
           I'm sure the one you're thinking of is Nguyen.

           The reason that they don't spell it "ing" in the goddamn first
           place is that it's not pronounced that way.  It's actually
           pronounced "ng", so a better question would be: why don't you
           pronounce it that way in the goddamn first place?  Actually, it
           can't be pronounced using English, only approximated (the
           alphabet is based on French, btw).  There are three reasons for
           this:

           1.  The "Ng" at the beginning.  We actually have this sound in
           English, but it only appears at the end of words.  For some
           reason it's really hard for us native English speakers to say
           it at the beginning of a word.  It's pronounced like the _end_
           of "ing".  I taught myself to say it by saying "ring" and
           holding the "ng" part at the end, after the "i".

           2.  The tone.  In Vietnamese (and many other Asian languages)
           the meaning of a word depends on the tone you use when saying
           it.  This can't really be described in writing, so get a
           Vietnamese person to pronounce it for you.  It took me a while
           to even be able to hear tones in Vietnamese; they all sounded
           the same to me.  For Nguyen, it's kind of like starting your
           voice at a normal pitch at "Ng", making the pitch drop as you
           say the letters through "uy", and then making the pitch sharply
           rise as you say, "en".

           3.  The pacing.  In English, this word would be pronounced with
           two syllables: Nguy-en or maybe Ngu-yen.  However, in
           Vietnamese it's pronounced as one syllable.

           In my opinion, "gwin" (like Tony Gwynn) is the closest you can
           come in English, but even then it's not that close to the
           Vietnamese pronounciation.  - mikeym
        \_ \Win\