[NeedMoreTea]

I always liked the BBC's approach -- English words and well settled loan words are allowed to have regional pronunciation, foreign words go via the pronunciation unit. So news readers pronounce (or try in the case of that Icelandic volcano) locations, names etc as they are intended to be. Names are personal, it's offensive to mispronounce them. Make the effort, even if it involves struggling a little with sounds that are not a natural part of your language.

"Not care so long as you're understood" reminds me of US TV approach, where every report pronounces that funny foreign name different, often painfully wrong; or periodic fashions in education -- during the sixties and early seventies UK fashion for "no one cares about grammar so long as the little dear is understood". It's coloured, limited and ruined my communication for the following 50 years, despite much effort to self teach as an adult. I'll probably never put all commas, semicolons and what not in the right place naturally, nor clear sentences structure -- they come with a second editing pass. A pass HN mostly doesn't get, sorry. :)

We got, in total: "verbs -- doing words, adjectives -- describing words, nouns -- naming words, tenses, and the use of the full stop". I honestly remember nothing else of grammar being taught whatsoever.

TL;DR I would start wars against "not care as long as you're understood". It's a horrible, disrespectful and limiting approach. Happy New Year. :)

[lgessler]

I'm generally in agreement and want to anticipate an objection—that the sounds of foreign words often fall well outside of any given person's native set of sounds.

Take Iran for example. It's rendered often in English as [ɑɪ.ɹæn] (eye-ran). What it "should" be is [i.ɾɑn] (ee-rahn). Fortunately, all the sounds in [i.ɾɑn] are ones that occur in most varieties of English (with the exception of the [ɾ], but that's minor), so most speakers are able to accommodate without issue.

Now compare that to Shanghai: its English rendition is [ʃeɪŋ.hɑɪ], and its Mandarin pronunciation is [ʂâŋ.xài]. Most Englishes lack the voiceless retroflex fricative [ʂ], and the same for the voiceless velar fricative [x], and to make matters worse, Mandarin is tonal, which puts the correct pronunciation of this word squarely out of reach for almost all English speakers.

It still makes sense to insist that people try as hard as they reasonably can. Perhaps to say that speakers should get as close as possible—in the case of Shanghai, for example, maybe this would mean [ʃɑŋ.hɑɪ] instead of [ʃeɪŋ.hɑɪ].

[usrusr]

And Deutschland isn't actually pronounced Germany or l'Allemagne. At some point you have let go and allow a language to have its own words for geographic terms outside of where it is spoken. It can be I bit difficult where borders have shifted (revisionists would insist on "true" names even if they don't know them themselves without referencing a historic map while everybody else is making a conscious effort to avoid those) or where a name was forced on a place by invading foreigners that got ousted again, but it's perfectly possible to navigate that problem-space without trying to go native pronouncement everywhere.

In fact, in a case of politically questionable names it could even be seen as a sign of antirevisionist acceptance to introduce a badly butchered (if necessary) transcription and pronouncement of the local name into a language that used to have a name that isn't acceptable anymore.

[NeedMoreTea]

You're right that some come with not easily reached challenges, like the tonality of Chinese. BBC reports will periodically give a rendition that's like a foreign speaker dubbing in one word that feels alien to our natural tongue, with different intonation and what have you. Sometimes that sounds a little jarring or unnatural in the middle of a sentence. I picture the odd newsreader having to spend 20 minutes in a corridor trying to practice today's impossible challenge.

But I do give a lot of marks for them trying and exposing us to how the person pronounces their own name or town, and prefer it to Anglicising everything. Even if sometimes it only results in an imperfect close attempt with a layer of English speaker's difficulty, or that we don't realise it's not quite correct Finnish or Cantonese etc.