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This paper describes the results of a vowel perception test to Japanese learners in Saudi Arabia (JL) and native Japanese speakers (NS) using the Japanese vowels and the cardinal vowels by Daniel Jones. Concerning the vowels /a/ /i/ /e/, JL had difficulty in distinguishing /i/ from /e/. A highly important point from the results is that more mistakes on distinguishing /e/ from /a/ were observed than /e/ from /i/. This can be attributed to the pronunciation of /a/ in the Gulf dialect. Regarding the discrimination of front cardinal vowels, NS tended to consider open‐mid and open vowels as /e/, while JL tended to consider them as /a/. This is believed to be due to the influences of pronunciation in each mother tongue. With respect to the discrimination of back cardinal vowels, the result of NS and JL were almost same except that with the JL, there was confusion between /u/ and /o/.