[Bon mots]

It's those darn cases. Actually once you learn the basics, it's a fairly easy language to read...speaking it is a whole other matter.

The hardest sound for us to say is the slavic 'Szcz' as seen in the city name, "Szczecin", or at the end of the word "barszcz" (borscht or beet-root soup).

When I first learned, they said to pronounce it like the sound in 'Danish Charter.

Then the other one people have trouble with is km as in "kminek" (fennel). Think of saying c'mere (come here) in English without a space between the c and m.

[varmintman]

The idea of trying to pronounce the shch in 'fresh cheese' as a first approximation to the Russian Щ strikes me as overkill. All the thing really amounts to is pronouncing sh and bringing air OVER your tongue instead of under it.