I live in Hong Kong and have been trying to learn Cantonese which has a lot of strange sounds.
What you're talking about it Romanization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization

The reason for spellings like 'ng........' and other odd consonant clusters is that they possess sounds in their speech that either we don't have, or we use in different ways.
For example, in Cantonese, to say 'I', spelt in English would be 'ngor' because the accurate pronunciation has an 'ng' sound at the beginning, something we don't have in the English language, followed by the 'or; sound. (although even native Cantonese speakers say it simply 'or' a lot of the time)

Think of our use of 'ing' at the end of words. It's a similar 'ng' sound that the Chinese use, but put it at the front of the word, which is, as you say, unintuitive and looks wrong.

It helps if you listen to a native speaker talking.

The other examples you mention, such as Hsiao-Hsien, look strange, but then Asian languages are very different from ours so we can't expect to be able accurately reproduce all these sounds using our own spelling system. So I don't think you can call the English spellings inaccurate, its just the best we can do!

Taken from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization
'For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves tradeoffs between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown to for the romanized form to be comprehensible. Furthermore due to diachronic and synchronic variance no written language represents any spoken language with perfect accuracy and the vocal interpretation of a script may vary by a great degree among languages.'

Here you can see how Chinese (Pinyin) is Romanized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

Hope that helps!
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

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