Kuuma, kylmä, --- potato, potahto

A sudden cold comes across the room, many heads look up. Mikä? Mikä? Mikä? a dozen different mouths enquire; a child cries, a dog whines, the man in the corner plugs his ears. A cynic chuckles that sad, knowing chuckle. Lo, yet another poor American has tried to speak the language of the Finns.
At Katri's party, the man with the Kalashnikov had laughed when I said I hoped to learn Finnish. More than one other person had to struggle to keep a straight face. Still, I perservere, even if Hannu (yes, my host father) did plug his ears once when I broke out my Suomi.
You see, it's words like those above that keep foreigners from learning Finnish, in addition to about 14 odd tenses and a dozen cases. As if place names like Jyväskylä and long, many-voweled words were not enough. Did I mention umlauts?
I have chosen two of my favorite words for an example: kuuma and kylmä. Respectively, they are pronounced kooolmah (a long oo sound, like cool) and kewlma (A short ew, and a short a as in hat, cat, or bat). In practice, despite the missing L, they sound very much the same. What do they mean? These are the words for hot and cold.