My new company has a Vietnamese office packed with skillful developers. One thing about Vietnamese, as with my previous encounters with them is how I’ve always had trouble figuring out how to pronounce their name, until I found this tool online for just this purpose : http://www.howtosaythatname.com/   (I really like website with name that means exactly what it does. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about this techblog).

This site is easy to use. Just search for the name, find the match, then click the Play button to hear the pronunciation. One thing good about this site is that the pronunciation are actually spoken by a native speaker, so they are pretty much accurate.

While we’re at it, I joined my company’s in-house training yesterday. The product guru was introducing the C++ language and its creator – Bjarne Stroustrup; and how he wasn’t sure how to pronounce the name correctly. Too bad www.howtosaythatname.com doesn’t have a section on Scandinavian names yet. All is not lost! Apparently, Mr Stroustrup himself is aware of this and even has a section on his homepage here teaching people how to pronounce his name. I’m reposting his wave file here.

Also check this out : How to pronounce ‘Linux’