Comment by thaumasiotes
Comment by thaumasiotes 3 days ago
> but that doesn't mean that Vietnamese names are bad writing.
Not everybody agrees: https://www.jesusandmo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011-05-31.png
On a more serious note, I watched a Chinese drama with my parents, and the fact that the characters' names were in Chinese caused enormous problems for them.† This is hard for me to empathize with, but clearly it's something that some people can't handle.
† Another thing that caused them problems is that Chinese characters are addressed differently by different people, sometimes by name, sometimes by title, sometimes by a kinship term that will vary with the relationship between speaker and addressee....
That's easier for me to empathize with; it causes difficulties for me too, but those difficulties are mostly in the nature of nailing down a bunch of different pieces of information about each character, not in the nature of "why are you speaking a language that isn't English?!?"
I don't think foreign names are 'bad writing' but I do experience more difficulty keeping track of names that are in a language I'm completely unfamiliar with.
English names already have an allocated space in my brain. Fake names that follow the pattern of English names are usually easy to slot into the existing system. Names in my second language can be slightly more difficult but I seem to have developed a similar system of breaking them down and storing them. But names that don't fit into patterns I'm familiar with can be like trying to memorize completely arbitrary strings of information.
For example (grabbing some Aztec mythology names) "Tlaltecuhtli" won't be accurately stored beyond the first syllable or two until I've seen it many, many times, and if there's another character called "Tlazolteotl" I'm likely to mix them up.