"shi-i-ta-ke" is not very accurate. It's a long vowel, and the word has three syllables.
But english mostly ignores long vowels, hence the alternate spelling.
But english mostly ignores long vowels, hence the alternate spelling.
For those of you who want to have a better handle on the distinction, you can think of it as the sound having an extra 'beat', where a beat is the amount of time pronouncing that sound normally occupies.
It's easier if you take advantage of the one place English still distinguishes this: word boundaries.
Listen how you say, for example: Tibetan nitwit (you're holding the 'n' for two beats because your brain treats the distinction as important /when it's at a word boundary). You can do this with vowels too as an exercise, though they're a bit harder because English has a lot of vowels and finding good matches is a bit difficult.