Wikipedia says it is like Chóngqìng. “Chong” with long o sound, then tsin.

yeah, french (and borrowed words) is usually my hard-mode when it comes to pronunciations. this one is special because it’s dessert (or so I think).

Chongqing like “Chongqing Chicken”. not pronounced “chonking”.

“Añejo”, not pronounced “ah-neh-joe”

“Hors d’oeuvre”. funnily not pronounced “horse divorce”.

I see if I can think about it in English, and then put it into an online dictionary to get the mother language synonym

totally agree. there’s just some words out there in the internet that are too used liked ‘banned’ or ‘slams’ that get too saturated in search.

is it seemingly backwards though?

the point is, because the a.i. aggressively marketed now are llms. these have a strong point when it comes to language and syntax. the other half of this a.i. that we really want to skip are the made up facts they fill in.

i don’t use a.i. for searching (until i give up if i can’t find it). i feel my vocab increased thinking of similar words to get to the page i want.