After our first night here in Moscow, attempting to order the food that I wanted in the столовая (cafeteria) made me realize that Russians simply did not understand me that well. Often during the first few weeks (and even now) I would occasionally ask a Muscovite for something or other only to see the tell-tale squint:

When I see this, I know the person I’m talking to did not understand what I was saying. Fortunately, we have our phonetics class to rescue us from our awful accents. It turns out, that when speaking with Russians that they tend to use certain intonations combined with emphasis on particular words when they speak in order to convey additional meaning in a sentence. For example, with regards to ИК-3 (the intonation that is most often used with questions) I might take a look at a question like the following:
 
Is there a concert tomorrow?
 
The meaning of this sentence is relatively clear, but there are several implied possibilities that would depend on context. In Russian, this is made very explicit with intonation. For example, we could raise the pitch, which signals the emphasis, on the word “concert,” as such:
 
Is there a concert tomorrow?
 
This would imply that the asker of the question is interested in knowing if there is a concert tomorrow, or perhaps if there is a play going on tomorrow. Alternatively, we could change the emphasis:
 
Is there a concert tomorrow?
 
This would imply that the asker is uncertain on when the concert is happening. If someone was answering, they might just let them know it is happening two days from now, if that were the case.
This sort of variation doesn’t happen as much in English (or perhaps I’m more familiar with it), so it has been quite the effort to adapt to this mechanism in the Russian language. The examples I have shown you here are some of the more simple ones. Various intonations are used for everything from simply placing emphasis to expressing formality and sarcasm. I suspect I’m improving though, based on the amount of squints I’ve been getting lately.