Celebrity chef Luke Nguyen teaches us how to pronounce Australia's seventh most popular surname. Video by: Michelle Loh.

It's Australia's seventh most common surname and the third most common surname in our largest city, Sydney. But how many of us can pronounce it?

Yesterday news.com.au took to the streets of Sydney to see how many locals could pronounce the Vietnamese surname “Nguyen”.

The good citizens of the harbour city didn’t fare so well, so we popped down for a bit of a linguistic lesson with TV chef Luke Nguyen at his schmick little restaurant Red Lantern on Riley.

Luke was one of eight kids with the surname Nguyen at school, and used to cringe when the teachers read out the name at roll call.

Mostly they’d pronounce it like the common Australian surname “Ewan” with the letter “n” at the front. So, they’d pretty much say “Newan”. Many people we interviewed on the streets pronounced it that way too.

But as Luke Nguyen tells us, that’s not right.

So how to say it properly and impress your Vietnamese friends? It’s actually not that hard. The first thing you have to do is get your head around the “ng”.

In English, we only have the “ng” sound at the end of words like “thing” or “song”. In Vietnamese, they often use that sound at the beginning of words.

So pretend you’re saying the word “thing”. Now hold onto that end bit. Say it a few times. “Ng”. “Ng”. Get ready to start a word with it.

OK, that’s the tricky part. Now all you have to deal with is the “uyen”.

Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means a native speaker would pronounce the “uy” musically with a downwards inflection, then dip back up again on the “en”.

We’ll let you off that. All you need to do is run the “uy” and the “en” together so that they make a sound almost identical to the English word “win”.

Imagine you follow the Geelong Cats but you missed the game on the weekend. You ask your friend “Did Geelong win?”.

The secret is in the end of that sentence. Say the last five letters again, and say them as one syllable “ngwin”.

That’s it. Congratulations, you are now pronouncing Australia’s seventh most common surname better than many Vietnamese people.

And that, friends, is a Nguyen Nguyen situation for all of us.

Twitter: @antsharwood