Laura Rueckert: Hello, my name is Laura Rueckert. I'm American, but I married a German man with the last name Rueckert. To be honest, although I speak German fluently, I'm not very good at pronouncing the German 'R'. It's pretty annoying not to be able to pronounce your own name very well. Rueckert has two dots called an umlaut over the 'U' in German, but since we don't have that 'U' umlaut character in English, it's replaced with 'UE' in all my official American documents.

I live in Germany and people often ask me the right way to say my first name. Laura, like in English or Lawra, like in German. Since I've lived in Germany so long, both sound perfectly right to me.