Beans, and an Old Enemy Therein ...

I went to the corner store to buy beans for chili. The Russian word for "bean" is "fasol". I walk into the store, and seeing a Kazakh face, ask in Kazakh: "Do you have any fasol?" (lit: "At you beans are?") (I'd forgotten the Kazakh word for bean, which is burshak. It would have saved me a lot of trouble, as you'll see.) A blank stare from the saleslady. Thinking maybe Kazakh is the problem, I ask in Russian: "Do you have any fasol?" (lit: "Around you beans exist?") Another blank look. I have no choice but to try again. "Do you have any fasol?" A blank look. I come face to face with the paucity of my bean-describing vocabulary. "They're little. They're food. I need them wet," I try. "Fasol." The woman frowns and says, "No, we don't have those." "Do you know what I'm talking about?" "No," she says. "FASOL," I say. The commotion has attracted another saleswoman. "Can you understand me?" I ask. "I need fasol. Maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong." The women look at each other. "Fasol," I say again. "Ah!" they say. "You need fasol." "Yes! What did I say?" "You said fasol." "And how is it supposed to be pronounced?" "Fasol." "Fasol?" "Yes." "Fasol. Am I saying it right?" "Sure, you're saying it right." "Do you have any?" "No."

So what went wrong here? As I discovered when I finally found a can in another store, is that fasol has the hated-by-Americans-trying-to-speak-Russian-everywhere myakii znak at the end, which turns the normal L into a mysterious Russian soft L. I, for one, cannot for the life of me hear any difference unless people leeringly exaggerate the pronunciation like they would do when talking to cats or very stupid people. But if you say the wrong L, the word is rendered totally incomprehensible to native speakers. "Fasol? What does he mean? Oh, he means FASOL."

Dammit.