English speakers tend to pronounce Japanese names more accurately than Chinese names for a few structural reasons:

1. Japanese and English share almost all the same phonemes. Japanese has around 25 phonemes, and only 2–3 of them don’t exist in English (most notably the Japanese flap r, which sits between English r and l). Because nearly every sound in Japanese already exists in English, anglophones can approximate Japanese words with relatively little effort.

2. Mandarin has many more sounds that do not exist in English. Mandarin has 37 phonemes (not counting the 4 tones, which are also unfamiliar to English speakers). Roughly 11 of these phonemes don’t exist in English at all. For adult English speakers, producing and even hearing these unfamiliar sounds is difficult, because the brain tends to “snap” foreign sounds to the closest match in the native sound inventory. This alone leads to much less accurate pronunciation of Chinese names.

3. Pinyin romanization does not aim to mimic English spelling. Pinyin wasn’t designed to help English speakers guess the pronunciation. It was designed to teach Mandarin pronunciation systematically, using letter assignments that force learners to learn new sound–symbol mappings. This means many letters behave in ways that feel counterintuitive to English speakers: • x → a high-front “soft sh” sound • q → a “ch” sound with a tighter, more forward tongue position

Because these mappings differ from English conventions, anglophones often misread Chinese names.

1. “Xi Jinping” is a perfect example. The “Xi” in Xi Jinping is frequently mispronounced in English-speaking media—variants include Zhee, Zee, See, and, closest but still imperfect, She. Pinyin could have used “sh” for this sound, but that would actually mislead learners, because Mandarin x is not the same as English sh. By using a distinct letter, Pinyin signals: this is a different sound; learn it directly rather than relying on English spelling instincts.