The two biggest problems I have speaking French

So I'm going over my presentation for the all-important interview next week, and as I go through it, reading out loud, I've realized that there are two things that account for nearly all my trouble in actually getting a string of French words out.

The first is hiatus, which is a situation where you have two vowels sitting next to each other. Languages don't like this situation much, as a rule, and so they tend to avoid it. If you must have two vowels together in English, generally you put a glide between them (like /y/ or /w/) or a glottal stop (the thing that separates the vowel sounds in uh-oh). For example, take the word hiatus itself: yeah, there are two vowels right next to each other (spelled "i" and "a"), but the "i" sound in English is really /ay/, so the /y/ makes for a smooth transition. This is how it's done in English. In French, though, you have words like variété that have two vowels next to each other without a glide in between, and it trips me up every single time.

The second problem I have is palatalization, or rather, the near-lack of it in French. Palatalization is what happens when you have a sound like "ee" or "y" after certain consonants that are pronounced with the tongue just behind the teeth, like /d/, /t/, or /s/. This is the phenomenon that gives us "whatchu" from what you in English, and we tend to do it a lot, especially us Yankees. I can manage to not do it, but not within words unless I'm speaking really slowly. Try saying structure without saying a "ch" in the middle, or question without saying a "sh" or a "ch" in the middle. As you've guessed by now, that's how the French do it, and again, I miss it every single time.

So that's it. These two little things probably account for 90% of my unexpected disfluencies, because once I hear what I'm doing, I know it's wrong and I hesitate or stammer. I bet, ultimately, that my reluctance to speak more French is because of these phonological problems. A little knowledge (plus a little perfectionism) can be a dangerous thing... maybe if I didn't hear the difference between the English way of pronouncing things and the French way of pronouncing things, I wouldn't be bothered by all this, and I'd speak more fluently, albeit with a more pronounced American accent.

(Yes, linguists, I know that /y/ is really a high front rounded vowel. :)