I was just thinking that. We looked after a German exchange student some years ago. Her name was Eva (“eefa”).
And I should have been ‘Efa’ after my little dead auntie, but it would have been spelled ‘Eva’ so people in England where we lived would pronounce it properly!! Except that they wouldn’t would they? I think that would be said as ‘eeva’!
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When you’re playing Words With Friends (yn Saesneg) and wonder why it won’t accept ‘Caredig’
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Exactly. I find ‘siaron’ more asthetically pleasing than ‘sharon’. However, the downsides are a wider (weirder) range of pronounciations and forever having to spell out my email address! 
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It must be lovely, when you say, “Siaron” and get, “With an ‘i’?”
Probably would be - it’s never happened yet! (but then I’ve only been using this spelling for 17 years :-D)
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It is perhaps even worse for people with Irish names.
I have already outed myself as a (recovering) former “Archers” listener. Well, there used to be a popular/infamous character on there called Siobhain, pronounced (in English phonetics: something like “Shivorne” ).
Unless I was told, that’s one spelling I would never have guessed at!
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The ‘bh’ (I think) turns up in Scottish Gaelic too. Someplace on the Forum, I mentioned a friend leaving a book in the photocopier outside my old office at work and me finding it and being fascinated, as it was ‘Teach Yourself Gaelic’ and I found that, at a quick glance, a lot of the words were the same as Cymraeg but with spellings which represented soft mutations as their ‘hard’ letter with an ‘h’, so afon was something like ‘abhon’ - I just googled it, it’s ‘abhain’ pronounced more like ‘aven’, but I was right about ‘bh’!! I could see the logic of the softening being shown by ‘h’ and it must make mutations easier to learn!!
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…when you realise that the German word “Kauderwelsch” (which means something like “mumbo-jumbo” or “gibberish”) has nothing to do with the Welsh language because Welsh is, in fact, understandable
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…when you start recognising words that have mutated, so you can de-mutate to look them up in a dictionary and then feel smug because you are so clever.
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Interesting - diddorol iawn! Clearly the second half of the word is from the same root as the Anglo and/or Saxon ‘welsh’ meaning ‘foreign’, which is what they called the indigenous inhabitants of these islands when they landed!
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When the phone rings, your Grandmother asks:
-Tebe? (To you, in Russian)
And you absolutely authomatically say:
-Sa i’n gwybod.
The best thing is that Grandmother understands.
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So your Nain is a Welsh speaker now!!! How’s that for spreading the word!
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Yes, exactly 
Also related is “die Welschen” which is what I believe some German-speaking Swiss call their French-speaking neighbours: again, foreigners speaking some incomprehensible tongue.
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Welsh and English and Italian - Nain knows a bit from all the languages spoken in the family:) But she’s particularly interested in Welsh.
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At the opera you struggle to choose between the Welsh and English subtitles (which have different meanings) and then you get thrown by how much more Italian you now seem to understand too.
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you rush from work into town to catch the end of a Welsh language music day gig [Dydd Miwsic Cymraeg - someone did change it to cerddoriaeth before anyone asks] and then end up in the pub with a group of iaith cyntaf speakers, mainly from North Wales. Never has Welsh brain melt been so enjoyable!
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Da iawn for the speaking in the pub to iaith cyntaf speakers part! Look @aran successful pupil!
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It was hugely nerve wracking! You just have to not worry about seeming like a blithering idiot as you can barely speak coherently and the brain cogs just turn so much more slowly somehow (yet the cogs for noticing your mistakes whirr at super speed). This is compounded especially with not wishing to seem that stupid in front of the very attractive ladies in the group and when a guy tells you he came down to Cardiff originally to do a degree and stayed and that his degree was in the Welsh language. This is made harder as when not directly addressing me, they reverted to their ‘normal speed’, like the chipmunks but at normal pitch + background noise of a pub.
However, really, they were amazingly supportive and encouraging. I was so pleased to have used cefnogi [support]’ in a sentence in live conversation, I’ve heard the word quite a few times, but I think it was the first time it actually passed my lips!
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If you are doing the De Cymru varient, then I’m sure they realised that their accents and dialect made things hard for you! I have told many times of my first encounter with Yorkshire lads when we moved to York in 1952! I caught on pretty quickly, but I had to interpret for my mother for months! And everyone was first language English!
The stable lads who spoke to me didn’t mind speaking slower and slower until I caught on!!
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