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'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.

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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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