Craggs and I were in a cab yesterday, half-listening to a Cabvision video of some random Olympic skier talking about Sochi. She pronounced it Sach-ee, like Versace, and we spent the next several minutes wondering if we had been mispronouncing it all along. It seemed possible, after all. Russian as a language is basically an audible frown and a mouth full of soapstone.
So I looked it up:
So there, don't let anyone tell you any different. And people will tell you different, because it's a hard word and our national reading scores are piss poor and hard-or-soft-vowel-sound-in-a-foreign-language is just the worst. Even the participants are confused. But not you, because now you know.