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Q: What Chinese words or place names do your friends back home mispronounce and drive you nuts?
It used to drive me nuts when my mom and others would say "Guangzhou" like "Hwangjhou" or something, i.e. with way too much aspiration like she/they have to make it sound "foreign" lest they be accused of not pronouncing it "the right way". So funny, even though it did drive me nuts at the time. Same for "Beizhhhing" I bet there's a bunch of these.
Most of my friends back home can barely speak anything intelligible in terms of Chinese words or topographic names unless they have somehow been exposed to the language. In the end, however, it's probably the inverse for the Chinese here in terms of Western names. What matters the most, I believe, it simply being understood.
Anything with a 'zh' in it, my gran says it as a a single 'z'. So Shenzhen is a Shen-zen and Guangzhou is Guang-Zo, until corrected. But everyone else that cares is pretty much bang on the money. But it doesn't drive me nuts at all. I wouldn't expect them to know how to say any of the place names here because they've never been here and don't need to know them.
I'm just happy if they are even interested.
Shanghai is only one that bugs me... back in the states it's said like.. Shange-Hi!.. drives me nuts, yeah.. other cities I don't care so much about. You can mispronounce Beijing and Guangzhou as you like 
