Having just received NoME as a Xmas present my Christmas holiday goal is to catch up with the Mythgard class in time for the next class, reading the book along with the class. In class 2 or 3, the issue of how to pronounce Noldor with the late spelling (tilda above the N) came up. Tolkien does explicitly say this is a velar nasal in other works - hence the relationship with the word gnome). This is a sound in English but not found at the beginning of a word. It is however a very common initial consonant in most Australian Aboriginal languages, so as a teacher of Linguistics in Australia, I’ve had to teach students to pronounce word-initial velar nasals in many of my classes. One way to practice this is to say the word singing repeatedly (so singing, singing, singing…), gradually placing more and more stress on the second syllable (so sinNGING, siNGING, siNGING…), then drop the unstressed /si/ syllable, leaving ‘nging, nging, nging’. Then drop the final /ng/ (ngi ngi ngi). Now do this same with the nonsense word ‘songong’ so that you end up with a syllable /ngo/. Then you can add the -ldor. See how it goes.