And I don’t read pronunciation-signs, sorry.
Basically, it’s more or less the same as the Japanese i, I guess (why didn’t I describe it that way from the start >->), which is quite different from the English (a)i-sound.
If you follow the link you can see example Swedish word + audio pronunciations 
Besides, knowing basic IPA is surprisingly useful.
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I really struggle with the え. In french we have a few but for some reason i say é although it’s closer to è.
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Ah, that was a link! 
Well, that was the Swedish e-sound, in any case.
Close front unrounded vowel - Wikipedia is the i-sound. But, hearing it like this makes it clear that it’s different from the Japanese i. Better to use that for reference I guess.
I don’t deny it being useful to learn these things, but they never worked for me in school and I haven’t used them for any language learning since. I just go by audio of real language use and learn that way. And now that I’m learning Japanese it’s much the same, I don’t feel I need IPA to understand Japanese pronunciation because it’s really straightforward anyways.
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It’s worth remembering that your native language can affect how you hear the sounds of other languages. If your language doesn’t distinguish something, distinguishing it in a second language can be difficult, leading you to essentially hear it as something it isn’t.
Most of us here are English speakers, so I don’t know that there are really any sounds in Japanese that don’t exist in English, but there are certainly other issues that crop up from being English speakers.
Japanese speakers have the stereotypical issue of not being able to discern the English L and R, since neither is truly part of Japanese.
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So, true. I do find myself hearing å from time to time in Japanese, because it’s really close to the o-sound in ほんと for example. I’m clearly having problems hearing them as different the sounds.
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As a non native english speaker I am very confused. Where do you pronounce say that it sounds similar to a Japanese e? The sound in say is more like an ä or ei to me but not an e. The japanese e should be similar to the english bet or the first e of enemy. Though I am not sure if you even have a word that has an e that pronounced like the japanese e.
Ah, the discussion was about this…
We differentiate these in Québec French. For example, “j’aurai”(I will have) is higher in the mouth than “j’aurais”(I would have). Parisians don’t make that distinction tho.
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Maybe yours but I didn’t comment on that.
English (especially RP A.K.A Posh British English) has most of the phonemes of most languages, or at least has a set of phonemes that encompasses the phonemes of most other languages. They don’t necessarily appear in isolation though - they’re often only pronounced in combination with other sounds.
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This is the aspect I find the most interesting about Japanese, the lack of separation of “sounds” into consonants and vowels. But, it’s this whole other system of paired sounds. 
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I keep learning things about french pronunciation on this forum of all places. I don’t have a parisian accent but I also make no difference. I’ve never heard the difference from french speaking people. I want to hear it though. Been saying both aloud for a minute now and I can see how they would slightly differ because of context and thus tone though. An enthusiastic: I will have chocolate “j’aurai” sounds slightly different from a disappointed I would have liked “j’aurais” some chocolate! But it’s interesting they actually sound different in quebec.
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We say “j’aurai” like “marée” and “j’aurais” like “marais”. I just checked with Google translate and the voice doesn’t make a distinction with the verb tenses but does with “marée” and “marais”.
Edit:I mean the last syllables. The “j’au” part is the same as in standard French.
Le Conjugueur - Formation du futur.
“À la première personne du singulier, la prononciation est légèrement différente. Le futur a un son [é] légèrement fermé tandis que le conditionnel à un son [è] ouvert.”
I guess Google translate is wrong then lol
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Just listen to how it’s pronounced and mimic it.
You’re not going to get better at pronunciation by making them analogous to what you know in English.
It was a good way to get the pronunciation more or less right at a time when you couldn’t easily get recordings of native speakers, but I see no point in still relying on it today.
Just listen, record yourself, compare again, until you get a proper idea of how to produce it.
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The problem with that approach is that sound differeintianton often can’t be noticed unless you are trained to. One only develops the sound differentiation as a toddler when it is relevant in a language. So the only way to get correct Japanese pronunciation consistently will be to explicitly study the phonetics of the language, get natives to explicitly point out what part of your speech is accented.
For an example of why listening isn’t enough, it’s likely you didn’t know thay the Japanese “sh” is somewhat different than the English one. But pure listening would never get you that.
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Well, of course you may have to think about it a bit, but I disagree that only children could learn the difference by listening.
I think I picked them up quite naturally by listening mostly. But monolingual people may have a more difficult time. On a side note that ‘sh’ is one of the more painful to hear pronounced wrong 
But I agree a lot of it can be corrected quite easily by looking at the positions of lips, mouth etc. and putting conscious effort into it. Dogen’s pronunciation series was quite interesting, but very America centric so not so useful for me.
I keep forgetting native English speaker grow up with a narrower range of frequencies they can properly detect.
I was lucky enough to grow up with a language that encompasses a very wide range, so sorry if my reply came across as inconsiderate.
However I think that in this case, it makes even less sense to rely on analogs in your own language.
Sure, but I guess I was just advocating for either wilting in your pronunciation with a native or look at detailed online information on how to move your mouth in the right ways, rather than just mimicking on your own. Like, even now that I know how to make the sound, I still don’t hear the difference, so there was no way I would have gotten it just by listening by myself.
I think you are priveledged growing up with more languages. I have spent hours trying to hear the difference between ɕ and ʃ but I just can’t. They literally sound exactly the same to me. The only way I even can know it is real different sound is through an interactive proof with someone that can hear it. 
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