Hi, my name is Friendly

It's always bothered me a bit when my Chinese students insist on using their "American names" in class.

I understand the reasoning: Chenxuan and Xiaxia are daunting pronunciation challenges for most Americans, language instructors or not. But to immediately replace those names with Charles and Shelley? Or worse, with abominations like Cherry or Bunni or Salmon. (Ah, the pleasure of naming oneself.) Seems like a waste.

But it's hard, avoiding those nicknames. On the first day of class, I always try to tackle the unfamiliar names on my roster. I do the traditionally awkward thing where I ask students to pronounce their names for me, while I scratch out sloppy phonetic translations (i.e. XiaXia=SheShe). This works okay, except that most of the time I think my students are only humoring me and my fraudulent pronunciation. The thing is, SheShe isn't even close. I'm neither applying the correct tone nor attending to the accent the characters demand; I'm just substituting a foreign word for a familiar one. I'm taking a shortcut.

I feel guilty about this struggle, especially as an ESL teacher. This should be easy for me, right? Even more frustrating is that I don't have much trouble sounding out Korean, Arabic, Swahili, Indonesian, or Japanese names. Okay, I studied Japanese, so that doesn't count. Still, Chinese pronunciation has become my personal linguistical nemesis. It taunts me from dark corners of my classroom. It lulls me into a stupor with its fascinating tonality.

It forces me to settle for SheShe.