Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
Actually, in US English, "lieu" is quite often pronounced with a hard L, making it a homophone with "loo". &c.
American English is shifting away from the soft consonants, as in lieu and dew. I should have mentioned that. Throbert has complete agreement from me about these points. People that use the hard pronunciation variants sometimes have a hard time noticing the difference between the hard and soft. They can't tell what softness is.

Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
Anyway, all of them are wrong sounds in Russian. "d" in "dew" can be pronounced like English j, can't it? This sound is neither hard nor soft and does not exist in Russian. ...
You can hear many variants, including the Russian type of soft d.

Some other consonants in English sometimes in soft mode: dueling mewling pew rue imbue (some of these also heard in hard mode) whew! No Russian soft w, I know.