In my linguistics class we had a Chinese girl who had adopted a European name. We all didn’t speak Cantonese and understood her wish to not have her name butchered all the time, except for one of us, a guy who thought he knew to differentiate between tones perfectly because he was learning Vietnamese. He saw himself as super woke and he thought it was wrong for her to adopt a European name when we should just try harder to pronounce her Chinese name (which honestly is just really difficult if you don’t speak the language at all, even for linguists). So he would constantly call her by her Chinese name which she initially didn’t even want to share, but he kept asking her for it, and from the look on her face I could tell that he did not get it right, and that she didn’t like it at all. The first time he did it she even told him it wasn’t correct, but he kept going, so sure he knew how to pronounce it. So like I 100% agree that we should put in effort to pronounce names from foreign languages and not give up on the first try if we get it wrong, but we should also respect people’s wishes when they know we can’t do it/they know it takes too much effort for them to teach us how to pronounce it. In that case, we should just use the name we’re being told to use. It’s that simple.
If people tell you that they have a non English name and an English name ask which one they would like to be called and then just comply with the one they choose it’s just that simple
