>>On the bright side, all kids in our daughter's school think I have a really cool first name :).
>
>Wow, I didn't finish reading you message when I tried to pronounce your last night. It sounded like "needle kwitch". Then I read your last sentence and felt bad.

To ease your mind, we write your name et al as Majk Koul, Džesap, Ajova (or Мајк Коул, Џесап, Ајова in Cyrillic). As phonetic as we can come close to, but then the spelling is lost.

Don't take this too seriously. It's just a given. English language will impede your hearing of other languages - blame the Great Vowel Shift, not yourself. And the words from similar languages will cross the language barrier more easily, but in most cases will inevitably suffer some change. So you can't pronounce lj (as in William if you bundle lli together), đ (like dy in goodyear pronounced fast), ć (like tch in gotcha, just a bit softer), and you maybe could pronounce nj (like in new when you don't pronounce it as noo), and you can't possibly pronounce r as a vowel, and words that begin with gn, kn, pn, ps, sc (that's s-tz), so what. We can't distinguish betwen t and th, d and th, v and w; we hear your a as aj (ay), o as ou (oh-short ooh), I as aj (uh-y).

Here are a few links to pages on my website where the differences in pronunciation are listed, for some common words (listed by language of origin): http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/italijanski.html, http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/francuski.html, http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/nemecki.html, http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/latinski.html and http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/ostalo.html. Also, http://www.ndragan.com/langsr/engleski.html has some pronunciation of English words, the way they are spelled, pronounced here, and pronounced in Serbian.