If you are a native English speaker trying to lean a Germainic foreign language, then retraining yourself that the vowels are pronounced
"ah, ay, e, oh, ooh"
instead of
"ay, e, eye, oh, you"
helps your pronunciation tremendously.
"ah, ay, e, oh, ooh"
instead of
"ay, e, eye, oh, you"
helps your pronunciation tremendously.
In English, most vowel letters end up being diphthongs, and speakers have trouble pronouncing vowels without putting a diphthong-like "curve" to the end of the vowel. For example, German "so" or Scandinavian "så" have a single vowel, whereas English "so" has a diphthong that makes it rhyme with "sew" /soʊ/.
Some of the Germanic vowels are also quite different. "e" and "i" exist in English ("men", "bin", though English doesn't have the long versions, as in German "mehr"), but "u", "ü" and "y" don't.
"o" is interesting in that it only exist a silent mouth shape at the beginning of certain w- words such as "what" and "where" (/ʍ/). The English "o" used in words like "move" is different.
This is overstated. I'll repeat that same sentence with diphthongs replaced by underscores:
In English, m_st v_wel letters end up being diphthongs, and speakers have trouble pron__ncing v_wels with__t putting a diphthong-l_ke "curve" to the end of the v_wel.
And "pronouncing" and "without" use digraphs for the diphthong. But even counting them, or double-counting them, or counting the "e" in like as also "being a diphthong", that doesn't look like "most vowel letters" to me.
This all depends on dialect, of course. Words like "ride" can occur both as diphthong (/ɹaɪd/) and monophthong (/ɹa:d/). Southern American dialects have things like vowel breaking that further puts a spin on vowels.
`eh` and `ay` can both easily be read as a dipthong that would be represented as `ei` in any reasonably spelled language (like Finnish).
I think t-eh-n is pretty illustrative of why eh works better than "ay" either way - ay is much much closer to ey and so ei.
In some languages it's /ɛ/ (English "eh"), in others it's /e/ (Scottish English "ay"), and in yet others it's /e̞/ (halfway between the two). It's rarely /ɛɪ/ ("ay" in most dialects of English), though it appears in many other languages written as something other than "e".
Dutch is an interesting case: /ɛ/, /e/, and /ɛɪ/ are all different phonemes (short "e", long "e"/"ee", and "ei"/"ij" respectively).
Many only have one. Greek just has /ɛ/. Japanese just has /e̞/.
Also, Danish is just completely weird. I remember a Danish friend laughing at me once for pronouncing the Danish/Norwegian word "dag" (day) in Norwegian. There it's pronounced somewhat like the English "dug", but with a longer "ah" sound in the middle. In Danish it's pronounced like the English "day". WTF?
In short, there are no such general rules for "Germanic" languages, there are huge differences.
This is consistent with the pronunciation of "jeg" (=I, as in myself) in Norwegian, where the 'g' is a soft sound.
In the books of "Dora the Explorer", usually the letter "i" in Spanish is replaced by the sound that makes "ee" instead of the sound of "e". So your first list should be
"ah, ay, ee, oh, ooh"