ʌ The u in cup and sun

How to say ʌ

1. 1

   Open the mouth about half way, less than for Japanese ア. The jaw relaxes rather than drops.

2. 2

   Leave the tongue in the middle of the mouth, neither pushed forward nor pulled back, and keep the lips neutral: not spread, not rounded.

3. 3

   Keep it short. ʌ stops quickly, and before p, t and k, as in cup, cut and luck, it's very short.

4. 4

   Check it in a row: cat, cut, cot. The tongue is furthest forward for cat, the jaw is lowest for cot, and cut sits between them, half open and relaxed.

Why ʌ is hard for Japanese speakers

To a Japanese ear, ʌ is ア, and that's not far off: of the three English vowels heard as ア, ʌ is probably the closest to it, especially in British voices. Katakana writes cup as カップ, sun as サン and luck as ラック.

So the hard part isn't ʌ itself. It's that hat and hut, or fan and fun, become the same ア, and in American voices so can lock and luck. The ear has to learn which way each one leans. Next to æ, ʌ is shorter and duller. Next to the ɑ of hot, it's shorter and less open.

Watch for loanwords that follow the spelling instead of the sound. Glove became グローブ and oven became オーブン, but both have ʌ, the vowel of cup, not an o.

How ʌ is spelled

ʌ in American and British English

American ʌ is made a little further back and sounds darker. British ʌ is more open and further forward, close to Japanese ア, so in British voices cup and cap sit closer together.

Many accents in the north of England have no ʌ at all. They use the vowel of put instead, so cup has the same vowel as put there.

研究： Strange et al. 1996 · Lambacher et al. 2005