Except the first syllable of 'character' is neither 'car' nor 'care', unless you have a really weird accent or are intentionally making fun of the English upper class.
PS: I always liked "squirrel" for SQL but sadly that one never got much traction.
However, in most American dialects, marry-merry-Mary are all merged and pronounced identically (IPA: /mɛɹi/, though the exact vowel isn't important here, and all three vowels generally sound the same to merged speakers). Furthermore, the first syllable of all these words is usually pronounced the same as the vowel in mare (/mɛɹ/).
So let's put this together. The word "care" is pronounced /kɛr/ in both merged and unmerged dialects (or /kɛː/ if you don't pronounce the /r/ there). In unmerged dialects, the word "character" is pronounced /kærəktər/, so it doesn't make sense that you'd truncate it to /kær/, because /ær/ (or /æː/) at the end of a syllable doesn't occur in any English dialect[2]. In merged dialects, however, "character" is pronounced /kɛrəktər/, so it makes sense to truncate it to /kɛr/, which is a homophone of "care".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...
[2]: Except Irish English, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673067.
[3]: I speak a merged dialect, and pronounce "char" as /kɛr/ when I'm reading C code.
This "'foo' as in 'bar'" stuff is worse than useless most of the time, as you've just been shown.
Plenty of people understand IPA.
> No, "car as in character" is still.
It's still completely incomprehensible unless you know which vowel sound is meant, which is the whole point of this sub-thread.
"Plenty of people" is misleading. Plenty as in thousands, millions of people worldwide, possibly, not not plenty as a percentage of the english people world. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of english speakers look at an IPA description of a sound and do anything other than go "what the fuck does that mean?".
Conversations like this are hard because accent doesn't transmit through text. I'm Irish.
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.
It does if you use IPA.
The only way I could pronounce it 'care' is if I were from the southern hemisphere.