When I was last seriously studying Japanese, I remember finding a YouTube video of a Japanese person teaching English. And I remember one point he made (I understood enough Japanese to follow a certain amount of what he said) was that the name of a given letter in the English alphabet was not the same as the sound it makes.

(In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, Japanese has a couple of phonetic alphabets. (Honestly, hiragana and katakana are probably more “phonetic” than English letters in a way.) But for those characters, there’s no distinction between the character’s name and the sound it makes. For instance, the sound the hiragana character “す” makes is similar to the English name “Sue”, and the name of that character is exactly the same. There’s no need for any distinction between the name of a hiragana/katakana character and the sound it makes in Japanese.)

It just wasn’t something that had occurred to me that some learners of English would have to be explicitly taught the distinction between the name of a letter and the sound it made, so it was interesting to hear.

I really need to get back into studying Japanese.