In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is d

In many Slavic languages there's a concept of "soft" and "hard" consonants. In Russian and Ukrainian, for example, whether the consonant is of either kind is determined by either the vowel that follows it or a special other letter, or, in case of Ukrainian, an apostrophe. In Polish, there's a diacritic sign for the same purpose, which is for some reason reversed for L. Anyways. The example that is very tricky to get right for an English speaker in Russian is: * мат (carpet) * мать (mother) * мять (crumple) * мят (crumpled) All four words usually sound the same to an English speaker. It's usually easier to tell the first two from the last two.