When Robert Brown taught our class Russian, he told us that you could tell which tourists had never studied Russian by the way they pronounced:
рестора́н
If they pronounced it "ris-to-RAN" they had studied Russian; the ones who still thought in English would pronounce it as "peck-toe-pah." We all had a good laugh about that.
A couple of years later I was in Moscow on a business trip. One evening, as we were walking through the hotel, the boss asked me, "David, I keep seeing these signs all over the place. What on earth is a peck-toe-pah?"
Luckily, I was walking slightly behind him, and he didn't see the expression on my face when he asked the question. The danger of laughing at the boss only made the situation funnier, but I was able to control myself and simply answer, "Oh, that's a restaurant."
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