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Alright, I'll bite. How is 'care' not phonetically the first syllable of 'character'? And if it's not, then what is?

'Care' rhymes with 'bear', 'share', 'fair'; 'car' rhymes with 'bar', 'far', 'mar'. 'Character', to me, is pronounced 'car-ack-ter' with the emphasis on the first syllable. It doesn't sound anything like 'care'.

Conversations like this are hard because accent doesn't transmit through text. I'm Irish.

Ohhhh, that's where the discrepancy is coming from. I didn't know it was pronounced 'car-ack-ter' with an Irish accent. I was thinking in terms of an American accent which is where the confusion came from.

The "listen" button here pronounces the words with an American accent:

https://translate.google.com/#en/ja/character%0Acare

> The "listen" button here pronounces the words with an American accent

I think that feature must be localised -- here it gives me a (female) voice with an English accent, and the two words sound quite different.

Oops, I was afraid of that. I was hoping the .com domain would have an influence on which voices were picked. I can hear the difference by going to https://translate.google.co.uk/ though

Forvo is a great site for this kind of stuff http://forvo.com/search/char/en/

> Conversations like this are hard because accent doesn't transmit through text.

It does if you use IPA.

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