Have you ever had this experience? You're sitting at a Russian friend's house eating lunch and you ask for a fork. They hand it over, but not without a suppressed giggle. Or, in a slightly less likely scenario, you're out at their stables expressing your admiration for their prize Akhal-Tekke stallion. They're happy for the praise, but they still wince and look a little pained. What's going on here?


If your friends are the supportive types who really want to see you make it in this world, they will clear their throats and regale you with a little illustrative joke. It's always the same joke, a real charmer, about a Georgian schoolteacher instructing his pupils on the proper spelling of a few particular Russian words. "Remember children, kon [stallion] and pen [tree trunk] are spelled with a soft sign," he says, although both of his own Ns are rather hard and stunted. "And vil'ka [fork] and tarel'ka [plate] are spelled without it," he adds, rolling the Ls over his tongue until they are as limp and mushy as old khachapuri.


At this point, you're supposed to burst out laughing -- this joke doesn't lend itself to written form, especially since part of the glorious humor involved is the Georgian accent, which really tickles the Russian funny bone -- and never again make the same mistake yourself, which is to confuse your hard consonants with your soft ones. That's vilka with a hard L, kon' with a soft N. Got it? Please make your Russian friends' lives easier for them. Don't make them listen to you toying ineffectually with the soft sign. There are lots and lots and lots of ways to speak bad Russian, but they will seemingly forgive you almost anything if you can just get this one issue down.


Knowing when to use what is only a small part of the problem. Being able to actually make the sounds required is where most people get hung up. The hard sign is easy. It's the soft sign that will have phonetics instructors keeping you after class, cranking your head back and watching your tongue loll around helplessly in a most unappealing manner. They will make you repeat terrible tongue twisters or just try fixing you with the fiercest look imaginable, hoping to scare you into squeaking out the right sound. Can't they just be satisfied with the fact that we can roll our Rs?


One American I know puts forth the notion that the English L is naturally soft -- proffering the word "lollipop" as an example -- and that we simply reach some sort of mental roadblock in Russian when the pressure's on. If this is true, then pray, let us all relax, because this little triumph of palatalization will prove one of the biggest boons ever in your Russian-speaking career. Do it, and someday you may even be paid the highest of compliments: that you sound just like a Balt. That's Balt with a hard L.