> You can also basically pronounce vowels however you want. I've been learning Hungarian, which has 14 vowels, all pronounced differently. To my American ears,

> You can also basically pronounce vowels however you want. I've been learning Hungarian, which has 14 vowels, all pronounced differently. To my American ears, the differences are very subtle and I often mix them up. To my surprise, even though I think the mix up is subtle, people often have a hard time understanding which words I meant to say. It's interesting to me that this works in some languages and not others. You've given some examples in English. And in Spanish, there's a game called "hablando con los i's" (speaking with i's), where you replace every vowel with an i, and things are still very much understandable. For example: "Yi istiy hiblindi cin lis i's".