Dialect, Accent, Vowel Reduction

Some people seem to say that Russian does not have accents, or that they are indistinguishable. I've seen someone say they've never even heard of okanye and akanye. Is this something I really need to focus on, or can I just let it naturally happen. It seems like such a huge difference to me, е and я changing to и and so on. Learning things the "standard russian" dialect is the way to go I guess but... I just feel like I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with stress in words and vowel reduction. I can't trust the spelling of a word anymore for the pronunciation :cry:

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Originally Posted by xXHoax

Some people seem to say that Russian does not have accents, or that they are indistinguishable. I've seen someone say they've never even heard of okanye and akanye. Is this something I really need to focus on, or can I just let it naturally happen. It seems like such a huge difference to me, е and я changing to и and so on. Learning things the "standard russian" dialect is the way to go I guess but... I just feel like I'm getting a bit overwhelmed with stress in words and vowel reduction. I can't trust the spelling of a word anymore for the pronunciation :cry:

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There are no accents in Russia.
Ukrainian Russian is a little bit different, but mostly because of the intonation.

Different types of unstressed vocalism in Russian exist, but are disappearing under the standard pronunciation domination.

If you do not want to go through the hassle of the vowel reduction, you can ignore it and still be perfectly understandable by every native Russian.
Many Russian-learners do so. So your unreduced vowels will be rather interpreted as a foreign accent than as some local Russian dialect.

O/A reduction is the least you should worry about now (among all other things that you have to learn to make your speech at least understandeable).