Most people do not pronounce the / in almond and they are right not to do so because the I should not really be there. In Latin, the word was originally spelt amygdala, which in Late Latin became amandula. This Late Latin word slowly worked its way into Romance languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, but as this occurred people made the mistake of thinking that amandula—like algebra, alchemy, and alcove—was Arabic in origin. As a result, they assumed that the letter a at the beginning of amandula was actually a remnant of the Arabic definite article al, meaning the, and that the mandula part meant something like nut. Having made this assumption, Italians chose to drop what they supposed was a superfluous article and started spelling the word mandola. The French and Spanish made the same false assumption, but acted on it differently: they “fixed” the word by adding the supposedly missing / and ended up with almande in French and almendra in Spanish. Later the French changed their minds and dropped the /—so the French word is presently spelt amande—but not before the English had already borrowed the word from them. Accordingly, almond is still spelt with an / in English.
The kernel of the fruit produced by either the sweet or the bitter almond tree are similar in appearance. The sweet almond is available in two popular varieties known as Jordan and Valencia, both of which are highly regarded.