> A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill.
There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language.
The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits.
As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.
There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language.
The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits.
As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.