> > I have been hearing Japanese and Japanese-sounding names mispronounced on TV a lot recently. I've heard "Naruto" pronounced "Nuh-ROO-to", "Hanako" pronounced "Hanna-ko" and "Garu" pronounced "Gare-u". Sometimes it bothers me that they do that.
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> What's interesting to me is that once you know the basics (each consonant/vowel combo is one syllable) you can really avoid a lot of the blatant mispronounciations like that. Not like English where there are approximately twelfty billion different rules, and an exception to sixfty million of them.

It's not just Japanese, it's a whole lot of languages. Finnish, German, and Spanish come right to my mind, and I'm sure there are many more. I would guess the majority of the world's languages have close to 1-to-1 correspondence between written and spoken letters. But because English does not, English speakers have trouble learning these languages.