Maybe boring little anecdote.

The first time I ever ran across “Chinese dragons” was at a local Chinese restaurant back in the early to mid eighties, and the owner/operators were a Chinese couple.

But I had never seen the name for the dragons written anywhere, but in English for sure.

So, until many years later, I thought it would be spelled lung in English because that’s closer to how they said it than long.

By the time I was old enough to be curious about it, the restaurant had closed, and afaik the couple was nowhere in town. So I have no clue if they’re pronunciation was the standard one, or a dialect variation or what, but I’ve heard maybe a half dozen ways to say the word since then, with the English “long” version still feeling weird to me.

I keep hoping I’ll run across a situation where a discussion of that word’s pronunciation will be detailed and I can just sit back and absorb it all.