Quote Originally Posted by skyblueteapot
I understood from my book that stressed and unstressed syllables sound very different in Russian, and I'd read all the descriptions of the different vowel sounds, but there's no substitute for actually hearing them, is there?
Well, I guess there isn't, but descriptions should help a bit too. E.g. the unstressed o/a is very close to the first vowel in "computer" (so called schwa), for example (I am simplifying things a bit, as it will depend on the position of the unstressed vowel too, but it is too early for you to worry about that imo). "i" as in "it" is a good proxy for "bl", especially if you can make it a bit longer. (edit: I was assuming you were speaking AmE, but since you are from the UK, this advice might not apply).

You can use that news site to check your pronunciation.

I would definitely warn against any automatic reading programs -- they probably sound just as unnatural as you, and you should not use them as guides.

I guess one big mistake a lot of English-speaking people make when they try speaking Russian is trying too hard, it gets especially funny when people try pronouncing long names. The unstressed vowels get reduced because we do not care about them too much and place little effort there, and same goes for the consonant clusters where consonants often get dropped.
And always remember that written Russian is not exactly phonetic (it's about as phonetic as French) -- that is, if you know the stress and the rules you can usually figure out how a written word is pronounced, but generally it will not be pronounced "as written".

The other thing that I was doing in my head as I read was reading each word as a separate entity. Not only does that not happen in practice in any language (native speakers generally run words together) but it seems particularly impossible in Russian.
You are right that every language runs words together, but I do not think Russian is particularly special here. You can read Russian text stopping after most words, it would sound unnatural but legible. Kids who are learning to read do that. Perhaps you are not too familiar with the alphabet, or are trying to guess the stress or something and that distracts you from reading further? Once you've been reading more this problem should disappear.

http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/webcast/ I realised that they were running the little words together and putting breaks into the middle of long words to avoid tongue dislocation.
I listened to one file there. They do speak quite slowly and clearly, and almost naturally (more naturally than Pimsleur actors, for one). They actually do put pauses in between some words where in normal speech people wouldn't usually do so, but even regular newscasts do that sometimes to improve clarity.

P2P eh? What's that?
www.slyck.com
http://btjunkie.org/search?q=pimsleur+russian
http://www.emugle.com/search.php?q=pimsleur+russian