As an ESL teacher, I try to be careful with my pronunciation. The sounds of English are frustrating enough without the teacher botching them up.
CA speakers are said to be "accent" free which I believe is the linguist's polite way of saying "boring." We Californians have little use for many sounds, like the a in father or bath, so we simply substitute the schwa sound which isn't a written vowel at all and has earned a bad but deserved rep as the lazy vowel because when English speakers find a word a bit difficult to pronounce, they often use the schwa instead. Phonetic alphabets use an upside down "e" to indicate the sound. I wish I could pronounce it for you.
I think teachers ought to set an example, so I do try to be careful with both my pronunciation and my enunciation although not as grand as my friend, Dale, who once was a radio announcer and "h-a-d to be q-u-i-t-e" careful to speak deeply.
That was years ago, though, and I actually became interested in pronunciation years ago, too, when I got my first full time job at BofA where they insisted we call our customers by name.
In those days there was no roped off line where folks were sent to the first available window. No. In the good old days, one was free to line up for whichever teller one preferred. And there was one Japanese guy who always managed to get in my line. Truthfully, it wasn't so much that he liked me as much as it was that the other tellers didn't like him, so they would find a variety of things to do when he came in because they didn't want to have to greet him by name - which I rendered "Take shit a."
Years later I studied Japanese and learned that the sounds of language often differ not just because of the individual sounds of the letters (or in this case symbols) but also because of the placement of syllables. Thus, the capital of Japan is
To Kyo rather than the way we generally pronounce it as To ky o. Likewise a Toy o ta is really a To yo ta.
But I didn't speak Japanese back then, so when he would come to my window I would smile and say as kindly as I could, "Hello Mr. Take shit a." Of course, I know now that his name should have been pronounced Ta ke shi ta.
My struggle with names continued long after I was in grad school and teaching my first classes. I had the cutest female Chinese student whose name was spelled Lui Hui and for most of the semester I'd called her Luey Huey as if she were a niece of Donald Duck. And she would politely answer me. It wasn't until the semester was almost over that I realized my error when I heard a friend call to her across the parking lot. "Lee Way!"
I'd seen others struggle with English pronunciation, of course, especially as a student at Cal Poly were many of our profs were foreign born. We had one statistics teacher who got quite angry when we didn't understand one day as he kept repeating so-me-thi-ing. On this particular afternoon when he tried to say it the twittering got louder and louder. I was quite a bit older than the other students, but I could barely control myself. I too found it hard not laugh at this increasing frustration eventho I empathized with him. Finally, he scrawled the word across the board in big huge letter SOMETHING and said again so-me-thi-ing. By then the class was roaring, but it wasn't at all funny. Statistics is a hard enough subject without having to struggle to understand the prof.
Many of my students - recognizing our difficulty in pronouncing their names - often give themselves English nicknames, but even then they are often funny. I've had a Korean girl nicknamed Boom, a Thai girl named Stop and a Chinese fellow who called himself Water.
Some students stick to their guns and want to use their given names, but I've found that even when I learn to pronounce their names correctly, it's hard not to giggle because some still sound funny in English. Thus I will probably always struggle to keep a straight face when I have a young man introduce himself as Long Dong.
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