Brought back memories of taking french in middle school for me! I remember very little of that class, save the last few letters of the alphabet "w,x,y,z" as something like "double-vay, eex, igrek, zed" burned into my brain.
(Edit: I'm also learning quite a bit from the comments! "igrek" seems more common than I realized, and the american / english "why" pronunciation I grew up with may be the outlier!)
This thread has been a personal goldmine for me, as this just unlocked another memory lol.
When our elementary school started english classes, and we got an assignment to memorize the alphabet, I was getting help with that from my dad.
The twist was that he didn’t learn english in school, because during his time in school (less than a decade before USSR fell apart), kids were taught either french or german. He took both french and german at different points in time. And due to no internet and my less-than-perfect notes in class, pronunciation of some letters had to be “reverse-engineered”[0].
We didn’t make the mistake with W, because of that whole “double-u double-u double-u, tochka [aka dot], <the rest of the URL>” thing you hear on TV and elsewhere all the time when a website link is mentioned. But for V, I indeed got a bit embarrassed by learning it wrong and pronouncing it as “veh/vay” when reciting it in front of the class.
0. No internet access at the time, and english literacy among the population in our small city (that even most russian people have never even heard of, and if they did, still having zero knowledge about it) was pretty much non-existent at the time. Our republic (kind of an equivalent of a US state or an autonomous territory like Puerto Rico) had more than enough language-related problems to worry about already at the time to even bother with english at all, like the eternal fight over the importance/dominance of russian vs. tatar language. Which spilled into a lot of aspects of life, including politicians, parents, and schools having shitfights over legally mandated number of hours schools should dedicate to russian vs. tatar language classes.
(Edit: I'm also learning quite a bit from the comments! "igrek" seems more common than I realized, and the american / english "why" pronunciation I grew up with may be the outlier!)