Curiously, it's not the double consonants or the softer d's and t's of Italian that drive me to distraction as I'm studying the language--it's all those clustered vowels, such as the word for spoon: cucchiaio. Here we have four, count 'em!, vowels all in a nice neat row--and two of them are the same. To my knowledge (and I could easily be wrong here) there are no English words that contain this many consecutive vowels. Consequently, words like these are special challenges when it comes to proper pronunciation. Most English speakers would try to make the 'iaio' into a diphthong, so that it comes out sounding sort of like 'ow,' as in 'ouch, that hurts!' And how it does hurt. It takes a lot of practice for me to say ee-ah-ee-oh, quickly enough that it doesn't sound weird.
Even a simple and common word like euro is very difficult for me to master. In English, we'd just say Your-oh, just two simple sounds, and that's that.
And the very thing that makes Italian unique and lovely, it's lavish use of vowels presents yet another pronunciation hurdle. Often when a word ends with a vowel and is followed by another word that begins with a vowel, the custom is to merge the two vowel sounds. What this does is tighten up the flow of the words, so that it's not quite as easy to tell when one ends and the next one begins. Sometimes this is indicated by an apostrophe, such as quest'anno. Other times, the speaker is just expected to know when to run the words together. This, of course, has it's purpose--to make the transition from the first word to the second smoother, but a little at the expense of clarity. Still, like other language difficulties, after hours of practice, it begins to come naturally and we get the hang of it.
It seems that the Italian word for vowel is vocale; it's easy to see how both words came to us from 'Old Italian,' known better as Latin.
A presto...
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