The fatHa is often taught to Arabic learners as a short ‘a’ sound. However, there is no ‘a’ sound in English that resembles the fatHa. English has an unstressed ‘a’ sound, like in “about”, and it has long, stressed ‘a’ sounds, like in “cat” and “car”. These last two sounds don’t come anywhere near the sound of the fatHa. It could be argued that the fatHa is similar to the unstressed ‘a’, i.e. a schwa, but that’s not entirely accurate. And even if it were, the ‘e’ makes the same sound when it’s unstressed. Compare “dollar” and “super”. They have the same last syllable. And on top of that, the stressed ‘e’ makes a sound closer to the fatHa. For example, the first letter in “elephant” is close to the fatHa.

A good demonstration of this is the name أَحمَد. This can be romanized as “Ahmed” or “Ahmad”. When it’s romanized as “Ahmed”, English speakers tend to pronounce it as /AAH-med/. When it’s romanized as “Ahmad”, English speakers tend to pronounce it as /ah-MAAD/. In both cases, this shows that the ‘a’ has to be long when it’s stressed and is not representative of the fatHa. In Arabic, this name is pronounced with a sound more similar to the first letter in “elephant”.

Be aware, though, that this is also an approximation. If you wrote the name as “Ehmed”, English speakers would pronounce the first syllable like “eh?”, which is off the mark by a long shot. However, it’s also not actually pronounced /AAH-med/ or /ah-MAAD/ in Arabic. The two vowels in the name are closer to the first one in “elephant” (which is short) than the first one in “apple” (which is longer).

To sum up: There is no letter in English that accurately represents the fatHa in Arabic, but the ‘e’ comes closer than the ‘a’.