: Re: Do hard to pronounce names break immersion? I have a character in my book named Jiolluav (with the correct accent, Zholl-you-of or /ʒōl-'yoo-äv/), and I've written my entire "novel" (it's a

@Heady158

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Whenever you have something a bit weird and difficult to easily explain – where you have to educate the reader – do it through the presence of an Everyman Character who the audience better relates to and who themselves struggles with the concept.
In this case, have the character struggle with the name. "Jiolluav" as a string of letters is hard to remember, and doesn't follow normal rules for names in English (or existing foreign languages for that matter). Furthermore, the pronunciation "Zholl-you-of" is non-standard and doesn't follow from how people generally understand words to be pronounced. Therefore, the 'everyman' character needs to struggle with the name, and actively create some form of mnemonic to remember it and avoid insulting this Jiolluav person. This can be mentioned a couple of times more (and maybe even made fun of), before the everyman (and concurrently, much of the audience) get used to it.
This way, you can turn a frustrating and obtuse bit of worldbuilding into a memorable feature of the work.

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