[tsuujin]

The article doesn’t say it, but the pronunciation is identical to Japanese, which I am fond of in general.

In college Japanese class we were taught the phrase “ah, we soon get old” for a, i, u, e, and o respectively. I found it to be simple and satisfying.

[bloak]

Lots of the world's languages have exactly five vowels corresponding to [a], [e], [i], [o], [u], but Japanese is a bit unusual in that the Japanese [u] is unrounded, so it can be more precisely (narrowly) transcribed as [ɯ]. Spanish has a more "typical" set of five vowels. You would presumably be understood all right if you used Spanish vowels in Japanese but you wouldn't sound like a native, so pronouncing [ɯ] correctly usually wouldn't be one's first priority in learning Japanese. In Russian and Turkish, on the other hand, you would have to make a distinction between [u] and [ɯ]. (I'm not an authority on any of this; I just dabble in phonetics.)

[boerseth]

That clarifies a bit, but still leaves me confused at some of the choices made.

Why include both sounds "r" and "l", when they can be tricky to distinguish for some speakers, and then use Japanese as pronunciation guide? The sounds "m/n" are also easy to mix up. Same with "b/v", which are pretty much interchangeable to a lot of Spanish speakers. I think the number of consonants could have been reduced considerably.

I like how the language flows though. It seems like a goal has been to avoid consonant clusters. It feels kind of like Swahili, though I don't speak that at all. The only input I would have on this point is that the verb/noun/adjective markers "i/a/e" would be hard to distinguish against words ending in a vowel, which seems to happen a lot. In rapid speech I see that becoming a problem that would cause it to flow less well, or breed forth a need for a de facto fixed word order for clarity.

What if every word started with a consonant and ended in a vowel, including those three markers? What if we completely got rid of problem pairs like "rl/mn/bv", by removing one or both in each pair? Could we get by using mainly voiced consonants? I kind of want to fork this project and try it out.

To be clear, while I am being critical in this comment, I want to explicitly say also that it is an impressive job to have made a new language, and refine it to this level of minimalism. Perhaps I am wary after having "wasted" a lot of time on Esperanto.

[nine_k]

If you noticed, a ton of lexical material in Mini comes from Germanic and Romance languages, so even basic knowledge of English / German / Spanish / French is immediately helpful. Ditching the R/L distinction, or B/V distinction, or M/N distinction would kill most of this familiarity.

[Tor3]

Indeed - it is pretty easy to "get" the language as it is (for Europeans). But I'm sympathetic to the suggestion of ditching those distinctions - not everyone has a Indo-European language background. My Japanese wife still can't distinguish those sounds, even after a decade of trying. She has to watch me closely to separate those sounds. Plus F/H, which is also a problem.