Oh my gosh, you remind me so much of myself. I used to have such a hard time with words beginning with vowel sounds! I do Japanese so it's quite difficult sometimes, what I used to do as a kid is I used to put a 'k' before any vowel sound to soften the blow 😂😂😂 I would think recommend this but what I would recommend is just not thinking so much about the word, this k about the whole sentence in general to take the focus off of the vowel sound :)