Quote Originally Posted by Johanna
The phenomenon that I was originally referring to is that Russian vowels often have a faint hing of another vowel in the vowel that is being used (at least that's how it seems to me). This is one of the most obvious signs of a Russian accent (plus a few other languages)
This applies to the unstressed vowels. As fo the Croc's example, historically all softness and hardness signs were pronounced. 'ь' meant an extremely short vowel sounding in between of 'i' and 'e'.