What did you do to practice your Russian pronunciation?

[David27]

Agree with many of the above, I had a tutor when I was an upper beginner or lower intermediate level who I met with once a week for about 3-4 months with a focus on conversation and LOTS of interruption to work on accent and pronunciation. It must have done something because last week when Russians were making fun of my accent they said I sounded like a Czech or maybe Polish speaker who knows Russian. Obviously I didn’t get it quite down yet but at least I’m in the Slavic family lol.

[Purangi]

I would say the two most important things to work on are stress and vowel reduction.

I 100% agree with Ogrim’s quote above.

When in Russia, I met tens of foreign advanced Russian speakers. Some couldn’t produce Р, others confused В/Ф or Л/Ль, but what really caused communication breakdown were wrong stress and inadequate vowel reduction. As long as you get these two things right, people will understand you.

In terms of what you can do to improve those two things, here are my suggestions:

1. Each time you learn a new word, make sure you double check the above points. Many good online dictionaries will mark stress (including how it moves around) and vowel reduction. It will make learning vocabulary much more work at first, but believe me, it will same you much time later on. Your basic learning principle should be: if I haven’t learned where to put stress on a word, then I haven’t learned that word. I really wish someone would have told me that when I started!

2. Shadowing. This has been incredibly worth it for me, especially to get me from intermediate to advanced. I shadowed 45 min to 1 hour of material on Эхо Москвы everyday for many months. Just pick a show you like and go ahead, make sure to speak as clearly as you can, imitating as best as possible the hosts and guests. It will be slow at first, but trust me, in just a few weeks, you will see huge progress. If you keep doing this for one year, I believe any problem you might have with stress/vowel reduction will be pretty much solved.

Удачи тебе!