Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers

And for the pleasure of observing someone mistakenly do so. How many Pauls build a Les Paul?

For my part, even my two syllable first name can be hard for Anglophones, though they are usually very eager to learn how to say it (people are usually very kind). I Postel principle the shit out of it, anyway.

I know that biang is the name of a particular noodle; I'm not aware of kiang; and I believe that duang is a sound Jackie Chan made once. Which leads into a tangential question -- "duang" has no meaning. What would it mean to say it is "understandable" to millions of people?

English actually has all the relevant sounds in most dialects so I will try to explain in it reference to that. Most English dialects have environments where consonants are reliably aspirated, or not, depending on their voicing and surrounding environment. Unvoiced stops (p/t/k) in isolation "pat" or "cap" are moderately aspirated. Voiced stops (b/d/g) are not like "dog" or "bad". (Leaning on this pattern as a partial hack using a feature common in a lot of European languages, is why p and b are what they are in Pinyin, and many other Chinese romanizations.)

In principle, if your dialect does not have a length contrast for /æ/ after a voiced consonant (many do though including mine, making the vowel longer in that environment, so you'll have to try to say them with equal vowel length) then "pap" and "bab" (to rhyme with cap and cat) when whispered (no vocal chord movement, so all equally unvoiced) should be differentiated only by aspiration similar to Mandarin's p/b difference. Though aspiration is Mandarin is a bit more forceful.

As an aside, most people can hear the difference between those words when whispered, hearing a voiced or unvoiced consonant, based solely on the aspiration hint. Phonetic interpretation is a strange and subtle thing. And voicing in Mandarin? It plays the inferior role to aspiration's main starring role, a role reversal of the English arrangement.

Firstly, "English speakers" includes many people who speak multiple languages. Technically, English speakers also includes people who are non-native English speakers, who by definition know another language.

Secondly, there are many native English speakers who speak a second language, or who are at least exposed enough to second languages to know how they sound. For example, many states in the United States have a very large Hispanic population, parts of Canada have people who speak both English and French, many people from England speak second languages (French is fairly common if I recall correctly).

I think who you're thinking of are only the native English-speaking people who are not much exposed to other languages. There is a fairly large population of these, because the United States is fairly large and has lots of areas that are surrounded by only English speakers (as opposed to most other countries in the world, whose neighbors speak another language). Of course if you're only looking at the subset of people who aren't exposed to another language, you'd expect to see them have little knowledge of foreign languages!

(Side note: I wonder if even this phenomenon is decreasing, given greater immigration, the Internet, foreign TV/Movies being more available/popular, etc.)