Russian in a authentic way

Don´t get me wrong, Russian is one the most beautiful language in the world. But sometimes when I listen to “real” russian, like in interviews, it sounds like people just stepped out from the dentist.
It just sound so over-relaxed. I can´t follow in the text at all in many cases. I guess it comes with training.
It always sounds, to my swedish ears, that the interviewed person doesn’t really care.
Or concentrating on something else while talking. Can someone bring some light to this. Maybe all russians just are very cool and relaxed and always doing something else while talking (:

I think that is because of the hard consonants, which are produced in a very different way as in English, for example. Here’s an interesting video to illustrate: Russian Soft Consonant Phonetic Drills Фонетические упражнения для мягких согласных в русском языке - YouTube

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Russians are different like all other people. Some speak clealier, other not so clearly. I try to pronounciate in my Russian lessns here as clearly as possible because I am a teacher and I understand how difficult can be the foreign language (not only Russian) for learners and especially for beginners. But by the time you start understanding better also not a very clear speech.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the sound of the language. I often found when listening to real Chinese/Taiwanese people talking face to face that it sounded like they were having an argument.

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@cribbe, do you have any links as the examples? I don’t understand what you mean.

for example this one, where a person is talking about his favorite place in Moscow Login - LingQ

Cribbe, I’ve listened this podcast. It’s not bad in the prononciation. But it’s concidered of course the high level- B2, that’s why it can be difficult in speed and in the choice of words for an unprepared student. But in any case the pronunciation is not bad.

Russians are not different from other people except in the sense that all nationalities have their own specific character and culture, not just Russians. French flows together, Spanish from Spain is like a machine gun, Chinese sounds all sound the same, all of these reactions just reflect the fact that we are not familiar enough with the language. With enough listening these problems are overcome. I have no difficulty understanding spoken Russian because I have listened to so much of it.

Perfectly clear to me. Keep listening and you will get used to it.

Here is one not so relaxed guy:

I think he is the best Russian stand-up comedian of modern times :slight_smile:

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Ye your right, but sometimes the road feels very long (:

Now I understand. You are right, it looks like the person who speaks either is just woke up or he was very lazy at that moment or he has visited a dentist where he has had a local anaesthetic.
But the presenter has a perfect pronunciation.

And lately I’ve been mostly working with the russian version of “steves book”. I need more of that “just woke up” stuff I belive (:

I have listened the russian version of the Steve’s book. It was not a good example of reading. Unfortunately there are also some errors there, though the written text is fine.

I translated Steve’s book into Russian, but it was not me who was reading the chapters. I don’t also like the style of reading by this woman. Maybe I’ll correct some errors in the translation and will have recorded myself by the end of the year.

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I remember once giving a physics tutorial to some first or second year students just after having a tooth removed and a filling put in. They had anaesthetized my mouth on the left side and in the middle. They didn’t do any work on the right that day because they said it was bad to anaesthetize both the left, middle and right of the mouth at one time, since I would lose complete control of my jaw.