Yup, despite not having a linguistics background or fluency in more than one (human) language, I find this stuff pretty interesting. Text-to-speech like just using Siri can expose some of these issues (I like to set Siri to non-American English voices to hear how different it sounds).
My dim sum app uses text-to-speech (and speech to text) for Chinese, and when it's fed one word at a time, the compound words sometimes sound unnatural (and in Chinese sometimes a word's tone might change if it's combined with another word, I think for a similar reason, so it's easier to say the combined words).
Out of curiosity, I just tried google translate, and it pronounces hot dog pretty naturally, but for a contrast, the Japanese loanword throws in an intervening vowel.
