learning to read, revisited

So, my roommate just posed a seemingly simple question: what sound does the 'a' in "brandy" make? And out of the five college students in the room, none of us could come up with a definitive answer. The closest thing we could come up with was the short 'a' sound, as in "cat," but that still doesn't really sound right to me. And this makes me really wish I'd actually bothered to learn the IPA when Mrs. B. made me write out my songs for voice lessons in it; I feel like that would be helpful in this situation. Perhaps that will be my next course of weekend Google study. And in the long term, perhaps someday I will have the good fortune to take a linguistics class; that would be lovely.