I'm having trouble with the “e” pronunciation variation

even these vary by speaker

the e in enjoy does not sound like i in ship for me. I say emotion more like uh-motion, not ee-motion. it really just depends on the accent you have.

>In “explain” the sound of the “e” is very strong Not necessarily true, in my accent for example it sounds like 'ixplain' (no idea how to write it, sorry)! It's never a good idea to fixate on rigid 'rules' around how vowels are pronounced. There's just too much variation from country to country and from region to region *within* each English-speaking country. My best advice for you would be to consider what broad type of accent you'd most like to model your own accent on, and then focus on actively listening to it/doing a lot of shadowing. Basically, there are no real patterns that you can rely on 100% of the time regardless of accent/dialect so just zone in on what you want to focus on and go from there!

Cambridge Dictionary says /ɪ/ for the first three: /ɪnˈdʒɔɪ/ /ɪkˈspleɪn/ /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/ I say them as a schwa /ə/ because in Australian English, unstressed /ɪ/ has merged with /ə/. There are three ways of pronouncing the letter sequence "ear": /ɪə/ as in "hear" and "fear" /ɜː/ as in "Earth" and "learn" /ɑː/ as in "heart" and "hearth".

As others have said, these may vary by dialect. What you've outlined might be natural in some but not in others. Personally, in my dialect: The e in *enjoy* is more like eh than ih, so ehn-joy, like the e in "bet". The e in *explain* is not strong; the *plain* part is the strong syllable, so it's something like ehks-PLAIN (again, like the e in "bet"). The e in *emotion* is somewhere between ee and ih depending on context: ee-MO-shun or ih-MO-shun (like the ee in "seen" but shorter, or the i in "pin".) The e in *earth* sounds like er or ur, as in ur "purse" or the name "Ursula", or the er in "clover", "cover", "rubber", etc.

As a native Scottish speaker, I can advise we use many different 'sounds' for 'e'. Both sound and tone and pitch vary from word to word. Tone mostly varies due to emotion - angry sound, quiet sound, sharp business reply sound.

You're trying to look for a consistent pattern where there isn't one. That's just the way English is sometimes.

English has very inconsistent pronunciation and reduction of vowels. That's just how the language is, as it is an amalgam of different influences and lacks much spelling reform. There are also different dialects; the "e" in your first 3 examples is always close to "i/ə" the way I speak. Earth also isn't with a schwa, it's a little different (compare earth and hearth, the latter which is closer to schwa).

Well, you do understand that no consistent rule exists, which is an honest start.  Written English has 5 vowels, spoken English has over 14, the exact number depending on the dialect. And even worse, a lot of spellings reflect pronunciations that no longer exist for the average speaker.  You have to do a lot of listening and memorizing to get good at associating pronunciation and spelling. Kids in schools in English speaking countries have competitions called spelling bees to learn what words are spelled how, and native speakers all have stories about a word they learned by reading and spent years mispronouncing until they heard someone else say it.  All that is to say that your frustration is understandable, but even with all the challenges, you can succeed. 

Words are pronounced however they are pronounced, and writing is only an attempt to represent that pronunciation symbolically. Unfortunately, spelling and pronunciation are only lightly correlated in English, and spelling is often more useful for etymology or disambiguation. On the plus side, this partly reflects also the wide range of accepted pronunciations. I'm a native speaker of something close to General American and I don't pronounce either "enjoy" or "emotion" the way you describe, but I wouldn't find your pronunciations unusual, either.

Welcome to the language where everything is made up and the points don't matter

Yep, that's English. XD

English has too many vowel sounds and not enough letters, that’s the problem. So multiple different sounds are just written as “e.” Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a solution other than to just memorize them word by word. Sometimes you can pick out patterns and guess.

"Enjoy" sounding like the "i" in "ship" is a result of a linguistic merger and is not technically "proper" In "explain" I would argue that technically the "e" is silent" I personally don't pronounce "emotion" with an "ee" sound. I pronounce it like "uh-moh-shun" Point is, these particular differences you pointed out are mostly just dilectic or lazy speech.

I'm a southern UK speaker. For me, every one of your example words begins with /ə/. I haven't noticed any native speaker pronouncing "explain" with a distinct /e/, and disagree that "enjoy" is pronounced as if with an "i". Although, I do know that many American dialects in the Midwest region as well as New Zealand I think have the weak vowel merger, which causes /ɘ/ and /ɪ/ to be pronounced the same when unstressed.

For me enjoy and explain both sound like the i in ship unless I'm speaking slowly but the short e sound comes out if that syllable is emphasized like in exit. Maybe it's related to the pin-pen merger I had growing up that I intentionally got rid of

I don't think it matters that much, and it depends on accent. In my (american) experience, the "e" in "enjoy" is usually pronounced like the same in "then", it is just stressed less. Similarly, in "emotion" the sound is pretty similar to "them" (as in, "eh-mo-shen"). Idk about "earth" I feel like that is pretty normal for an "ea" diphthong, but you probably have a better understanding (of whether that's confusing) than I do, since I'm a native speaker. Anyway, if I meet a British person, I'm not thinking to myself that they pronounce everything wrong. Even my mom's accent is quite different than my own, and she pronounces lots of vowels in ways I never would. If you heard the way that lady says "house", your head would probably explode

English spelling has limited predictability. You just have to learn the spelling of each word individually.

1. In enjoy, the e is unstressed and therefore reduces to i. 2. I pronounce explain with a reduced e. 3. I pronounce emotion with a reduced e. 4. In earth, the ea are pronounced together. Look into vowel pairs or “word families” for some worksheets and explanations on this.

“English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.” - inahe on ##English

A pattern you might want to be aware of in English is that some vowels, "e" in particular, often become ə in unstressed syllables. For your first three examples, the "e" is part of an unstressed syllable, and so that would cause most English speakers to pronounce all three "e"s the same way, like ə. Here's how these words would look like with stress in all caps: ən-JOY əx-PLAIN ə-MO-shən A good example of this is "perfect". There are two words spelled this way, and the way you can tell them apart is the stress. PER-fect is an adjective, and since the second "e" is unstressed, it is pronounced like ə. On the other hand, per-FECT is a verb, and since the second "e" is stressed, it is pronounced like as in "bet".

I speak native hiberno English - I say most of those the same, the e is like schwa like if someone says “ehhh” - so “ehhh-njoy”, “ehhh-xplain”, “ehhh-motion”, but with earth the ‘ear-‘ are all together and it sounds more like “errr-th” For what it’s worth!

Enjoy is ehn joy for me

Enjoy, explain, and emotion have identical e sounds when I say them ( the same as the e in end)

Welcome to phonics, where the rules are made up and the language of origin doesn't matter! ex-plain or ix-plain are both normal. eh-motion, uh-motion, or ee-motion are all fine (the "ee" pronunciation is usually used to stress the word in the sentence though) Earth is pronounced "erth", i.e. take the "er" sound from "banner." At least in American English that is. In other dialects those pronunctions might be more like "ahth" and "baenuh" or "baanuh" Here's some poetry about English's absurd differences between spelling and pronuncations. "WHY ENGLISH IS SO HARD TO LEARN" is particularly hard to parse if you don't know both the noun and verb words for each of those spellings and pronunciations. (ex. the noun "dove" referring to the bird, pronounced "duv," and the verb "to dive" conjugated into past tense is also "dove" but pronounced like "doe-v") https://spellingsociety.org/uploaded_misc/poems-online-misc-1419940069.pdf

The language and its vocabulary were not created by spellers.

English letters are not at all consistent in the way that they're pronounced, especially not the vowels. It might be better to learn how words are pronounced instead of focusing on the individual letters.

In my accent the "e" in "enjoy" and "explain" are the same (the vowel sound that is used when saying the letter n). "Emotion" uses the e sound from the letter e. "Earth" doesn't even use an e sound. It's an "r" sound. I cannot help you find a pattern.

I personally think every one of those can use the ə and sound perfectly fine/ normal

You understand perfectly. There is no rule, or of there is then there are many exceptions

english has very few hard rules, fake it till you make it lol

Yeah for me (American whose lived in the Southwest, the South, and the Midwest), I say your examples like so: n-joy, like ‘eh’ from the letter N x-plain, like ‘eh’ from the letter X uh-mo-sh’n for emotion urth for earth So it’s generally a short “eh” sound at the beginning of a word, but it kinda morphs for other uses and can also vary day by day lol. Just find a way that feels natural to you!