Quote Originally Posted by Medved View Post
Yeah iCake is right, the Russians have the same problem but the other way round, we can't understand English. My approach is the same as iCake's, that is, focusing on sounds rather than words is the very first step. Unfortunately, in Russian there is a bunch of prefixes, suffixes and endings and you've gotta master all of them, in terms of how they sound in fast, fluent pronunciation and their approximate meanings. Also it's important to realize that the Russian speech flow is different than the English one, I mean stresses, reduction, and so on, and so forth. The "Unstressed O = A" issue is just a subcase of the master rule of vowel reduction. In my view, another good idea is to scrutinize small pieces of audio and video with according transcripts or subtitles to the degree when you can say "I understand what they say 100% and I know why they pronounce the stuff like this". Sort of like that.
I have found Russian movies on YouTube (mainly through MosFilm) and I've watched them with English subtitles, but I may try for Russian. I've been meaning to watch "Москва слёзам не верит" again. That's a good idea, to break it down that way. In my Russian Cinema class, we watched "Вор" with Russian subtitles, and while it was hard for me to always catch what was going on, it did help for following the language.