[its_ethan]

Maybe I'm just dumb but it claims simple phonetics but even after reading the pronunciation ("Say it like you mean it") section I still don't really understand how it's supposed to sound?

The singular "a" between verbs and objects, is that a long or short vowel sound - do vowels have short and long distinctions at all? It says all the consonants are pronounced how they are in English - but consonants don't have just one sound?

[int_19h]

There's no short/long distinction.

For consonants, when they say that, what it usually means is "consonant by itself" (i.e. not a part of a digraph like "th", and not followed by a vowel like "e" or "i").

[jprogr]

Vowels sound a bit more like in Spanish. The dictionary has pronunciations https://jprogr.github.io/buku-name/