kyoo-ee-et? I can't figure out how to say quiet with a long U.
Every time you say it, you're saying it with a long U sound (U as in "tube"). That sort of sums up my confusion about why the whole system of deciding which vowel sounds are separate has to be so messed up.
I would have thought that it was completely natural to decompose vowel sounds into their component vowel sound parts-- so "queue" would be composed of one consonant sound and two vowel sounds, roughly "k-ee-oo". This would lead to considering some letters to actually contain more than one sound, like long I-- which it actually does, to listen to it, "ah" and "ee", with a graduated transition between them. I would have considered something to be an atomic-level sound if one could make it without having to move the mouth to change the sound during utterance.
GoogleDictionary says ai is either a long I sound, or a two-syllable word said like ah-ee.
Yes, I know. That's one reason I chose it. The "ah-ee" is actually on there with a different pronunciation that stresses the boundary between the two sounds, but that doesn't mean that the one-syllable sound doesn't have those two sounds, though they're blended into each other. And unless you artificially introduce a hard break between the two sounds, the transition is always there, even if you give longer time to the sounds in isolation.
The more I think about it, the harder it is to pronounce a word naturally, or to figure out which sounds I hear, and which are artifacts of an artificial pronunciation!
One fun thing for me is that pronouncing a word out loud enough times can make it sound alien and even wrong.
