Western pronunciations of Middle eastern/ south Asian words

Very few Americans ever hear foreign words spoken by native speakers. Our only exposure to them is seeing them written in the spellings of their own language, or worse yet, transliterated into the Roman alphabet. So we pronounce "Baghdad" as bag-dad, because that's what it looks like in English. If Eminem's rendition sounds more like beg-dead to you, I'm curious about your location and the phonetics of your local regional accent, because to most of us he sounds like he's saying bag-dad, just like we all do.

This is why we call our southern neighbor MEKS-i-ko instead of MAY-khee-ko and why the Brits call their car a JAG-yoo-er instead of a kha-GWAR. (We at least say JAG-war so we're only half wrong.) We're just going by the spelling since we don't know how the natives say it. Even if we did, some of their sounds are not easy for us. These days most educated urban Americans can pronounce the KH sound of Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew and many other languages, but people who live in places where they rarely meet foreigners, and who have not studied in a university where they were exposed to a lot of foreign words, don't know how to pronounce the sound written J or X in Spanish, CH in German, KH in (romanized) Russian, etc.

With languages that are not written in the Roman alphabet it's far worse, because the sounds have already been inaccurately transliterated into a foreign alphabet which doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence with their own letters. The Arabic sound we write as GH is actually a voiced glottal or uvular fricative, an ongoing sound like Z or V but pronounced way back in the throat, not a stop pronounced at the roof of the mouth.

The CH, ZH and SH in Mandarin words are pronounced with the tongue turned back on itself, considerably different from the sounds transliterated as Q, J and X that are pronounced much farther forward.

A Spanish D between two vowels is pronounced like the TH in weather. And the Spanish R is pronounced like the T or D in American English liter and leader--which are homonyms in our country.

In order to transcribe foreign sounds properly we'd have to use the International Phonetic Alphabet. Most software doesn't have the complete font for it, and even if it did very few people know how to read it.