clyp.it/vwouaif3 1:35
Script:
“What? The final aim of science should be to give man as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wants to learn to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ must also be prepared for ‘grief unto death’? And that may well be the way things are! […] Even today you still have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, in short, lack of pain — and socialists and politicians of all parties fundamentally have no right to promise any more than that — or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of a bounty of refined pleasures and joys that hitherto have seldom been tasted. Should you decide on the former, i.e. if you want to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy. With scienceone can actually promote either of these goals! So far it may still be better known for its power to deprive man of his joys and make him colder, more statue-like, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great giver of pain! — And then its counterforce might at the same time be found: its immense capacity for letting new galaxies of joy flare up!”
It was interesting to listen to, and I don’t think your pronunciation is bad at all. In fact, while there clearly is a Russian accent, the pronunciation is understandable and reminds me of what I hear from professional translators on the news. I would probably recommend, if you want to further refine your accent, and sound more American -like or whatever, that you select a much simpler text to use and read from. When I listened to the recording, I wasn’t as much distracted or bothered by the accent as by the content of the text you were reading from and trying to understand what the text meant. I know it’s a text from Nietzsche, but it’s fairly complicated and uses rather unusual phrases that one rarely hears. So, I’d just pick a simpler text, maybe a newspaper article (a short one) from The New York Times for example and record by reading from it. I think then the listener can listen more to the speech and not be distracted by a complicated piece of writing. But overall, I’d say your off to a good start and would encourage you to keep at it. You’re doing well.
Pronunciation is pretty hard to correct or comment on on a board like this, and really requires a speech coach, in your case one familiar with the differences between the sounds of Russian and English, to refine. You have to read and maybe be shown how sounds differ between the languages to improve pronunciation, and this somewhat exceeds the scope of traditional language teaching. But, overall I’d say you did well. Half the work is getting the courage and motivation up to do something. And you’ve surely got that.
Okay, I'll read something from NYT in another half a year :)
