Board Thread:Wiki Discussions and Support/@comment-17623-20141120175501/@comment-24995794-20141127202517

Ten Tailed Fox wrote: SeaTerror wrote: I doubt that they say Ri. They are trained to pronounce names correctly. For instance they always say Luffy and not "Rufi" in One Piece.

They say "Ri". Dunno about Luffy because One Piece isn't worth my brain cells (or anyone's for that matter). But in the case of Rock Lee, they always call him "Ri" in the Japanese anime. Same as they call C "Shi". I can confirm that in classic, shippuden, and naruto sd they call him Rii (リー), but also, as you probably already know, they say rokku (ロック, rock).

I think, at the end, how they pronounce is up to the willingness and capacity of the speaker. So for example, you might find japanese people (who know english) that say "thank you" (but with great difficulty especially with the "th" sound) and "rock"; but most of the time they will follow the rules that Katakana uses to imitate that sounds in english that really don't exist in japanese, so they will say "sankyuu" (サンキュー) and rokku (ロック).