it has taken them all of five and a half minutes to start mispronouncing place names

Come on, guys, it's hard to get more phonetic for English speakers' benefit than romanized Mandarin
#jetlagthegame #RailRushTaiwan

(yes, there are exceptions, and I'll probably complain about them as they come up. I have degrees in linguistics and Chinese literature, so these are sounds I'm sensitive to.)

The really funny thing about this is I'm getting a good linguistics teaching moment out of it.

Sam misread "Da'an" as "daian."
my best guess about why is that adding that kind of diphthongy thing is how you separate two of the same vowel in American English. See also "cooperate," usually pronounced "cowoperate."

It's a total coincidence that it turned Mandarin 大 dà into Japanese 大 dai. I struggle to imagine Sam making that connection even after two Jet Lag seasons in Japan.