> I don't see what's so bad about pronouncing it,

It's because if you're not familiar with the word already, it tends to be difficult to know exactly how to pronounce words -- the spelling doesn't always indicate how the word should be pronounced.

Letters (vowels especially) have multiple sounds and can be combined to do weird things. One nice thing about a language like Japanese is that it's ridiculously easy to pronounce, since the letters don't combine to make entirely new and unexpected sounds. Each possible syllable in Japanese consists of either a vowel+consonant pair, a double consonant or double vowel pair (in which case the sound is stressed slightly more than usual) or a combination of two vowels. Combining the Japanese vowels a and i gets you a sound that is simply just a the two sounds for a and i pronounced quickly.

In English, letter pronounciation is inconsitent when they're combined. Consider my name, "Stephen," in which a p and an h combine to make a v sound (I recognize the spelling is an older one, but it's still quite common). Usually, however, p and h combine to make an f sound. I believe that tendency comes largely from words that are Greek in root, but it's still weird because neither p nor h in English sound anything like an f.

An e at the end of a word is usually silent and makes the vowel before it long (such as the word "make") but not always (consider the difference in the pronounciation of "massage" and "message": both have a silent e at the end, but the a before the e is pronounced differently each time).

I know a lot of this is because English is sort of a mutt of a language, and I would guess that our inconsistent spelling rules are closely related to our inconsistent pronounciation rules.

Stephen