Divide and conquer disemvowel or, reverse engineer it

Ok. so I didn't have any luck with this one. so I checked the community and Randy Eichelberger had a good answer.

But just copying the answer and move on doesn't do us any good, does it ? :)

So I dissected the code to understand how it works, and I think I got most of it right.

except that I don't understand why '' has to be in ''.join(split_word)

# for example disemvowel('hello')

def disemvowel(word):
    vowels = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "A", "E", "I", "O", "U"]

splits (word) into a list: ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']

    split_word = list(word) 

split_word.remove(vowels[0]) will remove first index of vowels i.e. 'a' from the word list.

    while vowels:
        try:
            split_word.remove(vowels[0]) 

when the list doesn't contain anything from vowels, it will delete it from vowels. i.e. delete 'a' and move on to the next index.

        except ValueError:                        
            del vowels[0]               

this I don't fully understand. I guess when vowels is empty, it will no longer try, so it will join the list i.e. ['h', 'l', 'l',] = 'hll'

    word = ''.join(split_word)                 

    return word

whole code:

def disemvowel(word):
    vowels = ["a", "e", "i", "o", "u", "A", "E", "I", "O", "U"]
    split_word = list(word)
    while vowels:
        try:
            split_word.remove(vowels[0]) 
        except ValueError:               
            del vowels[0]               
    word = ''.join(split_word)          

    return word

Wish there were more hints in these task.