Is chairo pronounced as both chai ro and cha iro?


The compound word ''chairo'' obviously comes from ''cha'' and ''iro'' so you
would think that the ''a'' and ''i'' would be pronounced separately. But
sometimes it sounds (to me) like they are pronounced as one sound similar to
the ''ai'' in the word ''hai''.

Are they pronounced both ways or just one ?




Imagine if you were an English speaker, asked by a Japanese that: "Should I
pronounce 'header' as ヘダー or ヘッダー?"

From a native speaker's standpoint, it is actually a non-problem: ちゃいろ is
always in three units
([morae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mora_\(linguistics\))) _cha-i-ro_. The
fact is not affected by word composition either, as バイト "part-time job" is
always _ba-i-to_ too. (And はい _ha-i_.)

So what leads to your question is, I think, in fact the mismatch between the
Japanese tongue and [your native language]'s ear. In every language, fast (I
mean, most of the daily) speech compromises on phonological clearness for
articulatory smoothness; which means in this case, the hiatus _a-i_ becomes so
seamless that many incidental factors such as relative length of _a_ to _i_ ,
emphasis, or surrounding intonation etc. could make you sometimes hear the
diphthong //ai// and other times not. It is hard to make a generalized advice
on this because it also depends on your language's threshold when to hear
//ai// and ⁠//a.i// as syllables.

Either way, no matter whether you believe that "chai-ro" and "cha-iro" are
distinct sounds uttered in separate manners, it is just an irrelevant matter
of where you accidentally put more muscle for Japanese speakers. The correct
way I think is to train yourself to utter cha / i / ro each in same length by
default (i.e. when no stress or intonation is in consideration).

