> pronounce ps as in "pissed" without the "i", instead of just the "s" (the "p" is silent), which is the correct way to pronounce it in English.

I'm genuinely lost reading your comment as neither the p nor the i are silent in pissed (/pɪst/). The only weird part is the "ed" pronounced "t" but that's fairly common in English.

I also don't get the part about "ps" in romance languages. There is no special pronunciation rule regarding this group of letters in French. Are you sure it's not specific to Italian?

Edit: I think I now realized you might be talking about the pronunciation of words like pseudo and psyched where the p would indeed be pronunced where it French (and I guess in the same way in Italian).

In Spain we have the Real Academia Española that more or less serves as an authoritative source of correctness. The ps group was marked as deprecated, so you can pronounce s and be happy. The suggestion to also write sicología or setiembre (instead of psicología and september) didn't catch up though.

For gn we have ñ, so we're not tempted to interpret it a la francesa.

I think the ps thing has nothing to do with romance languages. Germans say it the same way. It's just because English is odd here.

For Romanians, we pronounce signal correctly, though. We have "gn" as a sound in Romanian, for example "a răstigni" (to nail to a cross"), we don't change it to "ni".

But we do have the same problem as Italians with "pseudo": the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it?!? :-p

> the "p" is right there, why are you skipping it

Wait, they're skipping it?! Now that you mentioned it I think you're quite right, I don't remember hearing that many "p"s in front of "seudo".

Wait until you hear they don't pronounce the "e", either :-p