Yes, it would be difficult for a person to tell the exact word upon listening to its pronunciation if he is not familiar with the 44 speech SOUNDS in English. For example, the following words (including your pair of words) differ in pronunciation from each other only by ONE (vowel) SOUND. bitter .... /ˈbɪtə/ better ... /ˈbetə/ batter ... /ˈbætə/ butter ... /ˈbʌtə/ Thus, one need to know the SOUNDS, called PHONEMES, that make up the pronunciation of a particular word in order for him to RECOGNIZE (when he listens), REMEMBER (when he learns) and USE the word in speech later. Those who depend only on AUDIO pronunciations, like on Google, will find it difficult to say the word, let alone remembering it. Because, he doesn't know the SOUNDS that FORM those pronunciations!

The pronunciation is fine on those audio files - they are speaking with a specific accent of course. The sound quality of the audio files themselves isn't the best, so I can understand the difficulty you're having. My advice would be to use a website where people have uploaded their pronunciations of different words. This way you get to hear the word from several different speakers. forvo.com is one site, but there will be others. I checked 'butter' and I think there are 20+ different pronunciations from various English speaking countries. I use this site for french when I struggle with the pronunciation or hearing of a particular word.

The two words sound different to the native English ear. They are different enough that an English speaker can hear which one was said, even in isolation. However, they do sound similar. I think Italian only has about five vowels. They are nice, open, pure sounds that are beautiful for singing. Unfortunately, English has something like twenty vowel sounds, including diphthongs, and a lot of them are "in between" sounds. English is not ideal for singing! Yes, you will need to train your ear to hear differences that don't exist in Italian. Fortunately, most of the information in English is in the consonants, and mistakes in pronouncing vowels often just are heard as "an accent." I'm going to make the recording, but, as a kind of joke, I will follow it with a tongue-twister. In the tongue-twister, just try to pay attention to how many different vowel sounds there are. If you don't mind, I'll just use Vocaroo because I'm used to it. https://voca.ro/8GEII0radsI Batter. Butter. Batter. Butter. Batter. Butter. Batter. Butter. Ted Williams was the greatest batter in baseball history. To make pancakes, first grease the pan with butter, then pour in the pancake batter. Betty Botter bought some butter, but, she said, "this butter's bitter! If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter, But a bit of better butter will make my batter better." P.S. I just dictated the tongue-twister into my computer, usin my computer's speech dictation feature, and this is what my computer "heard." Except for the made-up name "Botter," notice that it was able to identify every vowel sound correctly. In particular, it never confused "batter" with "butter." "Betty butter bought some butter but she said this butters bitter if I put it in my batter it will make my batter bitter but a bit of better butter will make my batter better."

Wow, it’s amazing that Gabriel Sowrian got three down-votes, when his answer is absolutely correct and on-point. Thumbs-up from me. Andrea, you really need to learn the phonemes of English ASAP. Just listening will not be effective until you take the time to learn the phonemes, because you need to know what you’re listening for, and how to make the sounds with your articulatory organs. We’re only talking about (in most cases) a couple of hours of your time to get it right now, and then everything will be much easier. It’s more efficient to do so before you’ve learned 10000 words with inaccurate pronunciation, but still, it’s never too late. That said, here are some tips: In most accents, the vowel in “batter” is a front vowel similar to Italian è (well, between è and a), and the one in “butter” is a back vowel closer to Italian ò (actually, between ò and a, with your mouth a bit more closed than for A, and your lips not as rounded as for ò). The recordings in the Cambridge Dictionary sound perfectly standard, and there’s almost no difference in those words between the American (the one in the dictionary sounds like it’s from the western part of the US) and RP pronunciation of the vowels. Certainly, if you can get feedback in real time from someone who knows how to teach this, you’ll master it much more quickly. Or you can just continue fruitless hours of listening for the next couple of decades….