Hey hey - please don’t just limit that skill to non-anglo dialects - everyone is guilty of messing up a different language. However it takes a special talent in being perfectly capable of fucking up your own English roots
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Depends on the state. US is massive so wouldn’t be uncommon for someone on the northeast side to probably not have that Spanish exposure as much vs someone in Cali or Texas.
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This is true; I always take for granted that I can read and recognize most Spanish until I see or hear someone else not do it intuitively, and I am not academically fluent in anything but English. While I took Spanish in school, I have a far greater grasp of it (and other languages) from conversations with native speakers or consuming media which is subtitled or otherwise translated. There are a lot of second and third-generation immigrants that don’t read, speak or write in anything but English and even some Americans who struggle with English when that is their only native tongue. Couple that with cultural differences and reliance on dialects and slang and it makes it even worse, both in Spanish and otherwise (I know that estrella is a ‘standard’ word in Spanish but not everything is). An interesting example of this was my time in The USMC; we had a lot of people who spoke Spanish, but were from different backgrounds (Latin/South America, Caribbean, Europe, just American, etc) and you would be amazed how much they can stumble on just the accents or slang for basic things. Heck, we had one poor Airframer, Irizarry, who had such a thick accent with his Spanish that most of the other Spanish speakers asked him to speak English instead haha. Great guy but dude had kind of a “peanut butter mouth” when it came to his spanish pronounciation. I want to say his family was from Peru or Ecuador?
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isn’t it customary for any nationality speaking words they aren’t too familiar with 
Also, I’m gonna give everyone a little inside baseball here (to which Jay can elaborate more later if he wants to): He didn’t pick the name out of thin air, it was someone else’s proposition which he felt was perfect for the project.
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I think Jay should have put a little pronunciation tutorial on the back of the box for all of the non-Spanish speaking folk out there 
No, but seriously, I know it can be frustrating for some people that hear others pronounce Estrella as Es-STRELL-ah instead of Es-STREY-uh but is it really that offensive?
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To me, it’s a great learning opportunity if nothing else! People should never be embarrassed to learn something new!
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Now THAT’S an idea; talk about adding a tactile sensation to the experience! Although, and I ask this genuinely as I have no experience with Braille: is there specific pronunciation with Braille letters i.e. are there different characters for specific sounds? Or is it akin to reading where one must interpret the sound based on the structure of the grammar or language itself?
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Also helping:
01000101 01110011 01110100 01110010 01100101 01101100 01101100 01100001
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I really don’t know?..say in Japan, how do they braille Estrella 
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From what I can gather, it really depends on the intended language and exceptions are made per specific languages and cultures. From Wikipedia:
Novel systems of braille mapping include Korean, which adopts separate syllable-initial and syllable-final forms for its consonants, explicitly grouping braille cells into syllabic groups in the same way as hangul. Japanese, meanwhile, combines independent vowel dot patterns and modifier consonant dot patterns into a single braille cell – an abugida representation of each Japanese mora.
It’s worth noting that Japanese itself has several dialects/alphabets (Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji, Romanji) and a lot of the symbology includes combining symbols of words to create new words in the characters (such as the word for Firework being a combination of ‘fire’ and ‘flower’). So I think it entirely depends on what you want to convey: if you were actually presenting the Braille as simply “Estrella” or “Star”, you would use that word in the original language (as standard Braille). If you wanted to convey a Japanese word for star, such as “Hoshi” or “星”, then you would likely use that modified version mentioned in the wiki article or simply use Braille that conveys the term phonetically. For the record, Google translates Estrella directly to 星.
Language is neat!
Edit: Native or adopted speakers, feel free to correct any mistakes here as, like I said before, I am not fluent in anything other than English but I have exposure to a lot of other languages.
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Not here it isn’t, no (UK) but it seems standard to do so in the US
I’m a college-educated 59-year-old in upstate New York – five hours from the Hispanic hotbed of New York City. I took French in high school and German in college.
I had no idea “estrella” was a Spanish word. Combine that with the incredibly goofy names of some Chi-fi companies (AFUL, Shozy, Kefine, Artti, Ziigaat, Simgot, Letshouer, etc.) and their models (Delci – is it DEL-cee or DEL-chee?), and I just thought it was another weird name dreamed up by Chi-fi marketing mavens.
I doubt I’m alone. So, put me in the town pillory and pelt me with rocks and garbage. 
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I wasn’t offended btw, I just found it funny as it’s something I’ve come to notice frequently from Americans in particular. No offence intended
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No biggie, mate.
America is a BIG country. Our cultures and dialects are vast. I know this may be hard to believe, but there are MANY sections of rural America where a person may not hear another language or see a non-white person for YEARS. Seriously.
My wife grew up in a very small farming community. There were no non-white residents. The only time she heard another language was in Spanish class in high school. No joke.
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Тук говорим прекрасен английски.
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I deleted a paragraph before sending about the “US has no culture” circle-jerk Brits (I’m a Brit myself) like to keep going, and this seems a part of. I thought better of it but it’s just so smug and obvious. Keep being “amused” by the Philistines across the Atlantic.
Unless you’re fluent in every other language, there are plenty of times that you won’t even have a way of knowing that a product name was hawked from another language, especially as so many are made up on the spot for pleasing sounds and may have no language or meaning.
Example: Most people don’t know the Volkswagen Turan and Tuareg are a central Asian region and people group. I haven’t checked the “right” way of pronouncing them even though I know their origin. You probably don’t pronounce the “Fiesta” from Ford Fiesta like an Italian or Spanish speaker would.
You might notice it frequently from Americans because they’re making the majority of the reviews.
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Not going to lie: Languages that don’t use the standard alphabet, such as Russian and Asian tongues, always have fascinated me. I have no clue how to read them, but they’re interesting!
Back to Jay’s IEMs …
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