I can't remember where on the tape but I recall hearing Пётр say a short sentence in English and I thought at the time ‘Wow, he’s got a perfect English accent anyway’ so it looks like it was rather too perfect if it came at the expense of his Russian accent.

It’s a shame their accents are not very obviously Russian. There shouldn’t really be an issue with it. You’d think the makers of the course would have at least gone to the trouble of selecting speakers with authentic and indisputably Russian accents.

The copyright notice on the tape says 1979 and like I said, they were produced at the University of Exeter in Devon, England. They were obtained from ‘Drake Educational Associates’ at an address in Cardiff and the address and details were given in the Penguin Russian Course (the predecessor to the more familiar New Penguin Russian Course). There are 30 different sections corresponding to the 30 lessons in the book with an average of maybe four or five different exercises for each section.

That exercise is taken from lesson 11 so they’re perhaps still speaking somewhat more slowly and unnaturally at that stage. I think they might speed up a bit later on in the course. Still, it’s no excuse if the accent sounds that foreign to some people.

I have to say though, I have found them quite useful so far, if only to get me to practice speaking some Russian. When I have to construct a sentence and speak it within the pause given it does feel like I’m exercising a different part of my brain than usual

If anyone is interested in hearing some more of them, I guess I could upload them but I don’t really have any webspace for it. I just quickly got that geocities site set up to upload the original clip. I don’t know if they’ll close it down if it’s just being used to upload and download files.