I am new to Python. I am writing a program that distinguishes whether or not a word starts with a vowel. The problem is, that the program is only able to correctly handle up
Convert the word entirely to lowercase (or uppercase) first:
word = input("Please Enter a word:").lower() # Or `.upper()`
Also, to get the first letter of your word, use word[0], not word[1]. Lists are zero-indexed in Python and almost all programming languages.
You can also condense your code by quite a bit:
word = input("Please Enter a word:")
if word[0].lower() in 'aeiou':
print("The word begins with a vowel")
else:
print("The word do not begin with a vowel")