My phonetic log

[Ольга]

Thanks, guys! I'll practice it.

[Arnaud]

I think you should go back to the basics and use material for beginners, like Assimil "le nouvel anglais sans peine" (new english without toil: here's a link to the first lessons). I listen to it regularly and shadow it, not to forget the basics: to keep the standard accent "in mouth" like an old chewing-gum.
Repeat slowly what you hear, concentrate on the inflections of the speakers, the lengh of the english vowels and diphtongs compared to the russian ones, etc...
I think you already trained a lot but the results aren't at the level of your expectations, so it's difficult to give useful advice: shadowing books with your current pronunciation won't help you, imho: it would be like running a marathon with a millstone around the neck, instead of trying to run 1 km correctly, so imho it's better to go back to the fondamentals (perhaps by taking a few lessons with an english tutor speaking russian who could point out your most obvious problems).

[neofight78]

Congratulations on uploading a video, that takes courage!

I'm no expert and this is just a short clip, but my thoughts are as follows...

From the clip I'm getting the impression that the excerises and explanations you are using may actually be hindering you somewhat. Too much thinking about how to produce one sound, and always trying to make it exactly the same. I suspect that you are too conscious of your pronunciation and need to relax a little.

A better approach maybe just to listen to words or short phrases and try to repeat them accurately without to much analysing. If you got close move to the next word or phrase, if it didn't come out quite right experiment a bit and try to get closer.

All my vocabulary flashcards have audio. So one approach may be to take a bunch of words and make cards in Anki with audio. You can mark a card as correctly answered if you get close with the pronunciation, if it's too far off repeatedly listen and imitate the word until you get closer, and mark it as wrong so that it comes up again sooner.

Alternatively some kind of audio course where you have to repeat sentences or shadowing might help.

I do think you need to tackle this head on, and forget about reading so many books etc. Listen, repeat and get talking with others. I suspect the biggest part of the problem is confidence, relax, practice using imitation and I think you'll see some good results.

Also a good dose of listening will probably help. Listen as much as possible, and it doesn't matter how much attention you are paying or how much you understand. Just get used to the sound of the language.

[smallwhite]

I just wanted that somebody listened to it and criticized my pronunciation.

First: a correction- I think your sentence would be better written like this: I just wanted somebody to listen to it and criticize my pronunciation. "Listen" and "criticize" should not be in the past tense here. You are describing what you wanted. We don't use the past tense for this in this context. I am not a linguist nor an English-teacher, so, I can't really give you a thorough grammatical explanation as to why.

Cambridge Dictionary - Want

... We don’t use want with a that-clause...
... We always follow want with a complement of some kind. ... The complement can be a noun or pronoun as an object, or a verb in the to-infinitive form, or an object plus a verb in the to-infinitive form...

[Ольга]

Thank you, guys. Where can I find an exchange partner? Where is this thread?

[Ольга]

By the way, guys, does anybody know how to record a track from my acoustic system and my voice at the same time?
I wanted to compare my pronunciation and the pronunciation of the speaker.

[aokoye]

This makes me wish I was taking the "teaching pronunciation" course that my uni is offering in the Fall That said I only have a few things to add. Following off of someone else's post, I think it would be interesting to listen to what you sounded like if you weren't reading. I wonder too if speaking slower might help. If it is easier to understand you when you aren't reading then you might want to change how you go about working on pronunciation. I also think you really need to work on everything that is word final. There were a number of times that both vowels and consonants were missing or incorrect at the ends of words.

As others have said, as a native speaker I would not have been able to understand most of what you said had I not seen the transcript. For me this isn't an issue of not hearing L2 English speakers on a regular basis as I transcribe L2 English speakers' speech in conditions that are far worse than yours (lots and lots and lots of background noise, people talking over each other, things brushing up against the mics etc). Your writing skills are very high and it seems your reading skills are also probably pretty high as well. I do think you're going to have to go really go back to the basics with pronunciation though. I am not someone who subscribes to the notion that people should speak "without an accent", but I do think that being able to be understood is crucial. This also might be an area where working with an native/expert speaker of English over skype or in person may useful in addition to asking us for feedback.

Also I see no issue in hosting your videos on Youtube. It's a smart idea actually.

[Ольга]

You know, I communicated with one British guy from Coventry and he understood me well.
Well, maybe he pretended to understand me? I communicated with him for about 6 months.
This is my spontaneous speaking (very slow and stupid)

[iguanamon]

Thank you, guys. Where can I find an exchange partner? Where is this thread?

There is no specific thread on this forum but if I were in your place, I'd ask on the Russian Study Group thread here first. Just make a post saying something like: "I am a native Russian-speaker willing to give help to those learning Russian in exchange for help with English. Please PM me if interested."

Also, you can check with various language exchange groups online.

[neofight78]

You know, I communicated with one British guy from Coventry and he understood me well.
Well, maybe he pretended to understand me? I communicated with him for about 6 months.
This is my spontaneous speaking (very slow and stupid)

This is a lot better than your first example. I am able to understand what you are saying, and I'm sure the guy from Coventry did too when you were talking with him.

Also don't do yourself down. Speaking another language is hard, very hard. Anyone speaking spontaneously in another language is a smart cookie. It took me a long time before I could start speaking Russian at a reasonable rate, and believe me I went through a good long period of frustration to get there. Relax, keep working on the speaking and you'll see the results before too long.