Quote Originally Posted by Shady_arc View Post
Yeah, that's what difficult about real languages.
I was surprised myself when digging through wikipedia I found that Russian has OVER 15 VOWEL sounds, just like English. Only in English most of them are considered "different" and important to distinguish between words, while in Russian all of them are variations on standard А, И, У, Э, О, Ы.
There are as many vowel sounds in Russian as you wish, but there are only 6 (some say 5) vowel phonemes which can distinguish words.