[Tomte]

Even listening is hard.

I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be.

Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").

[kevinstubbs]

I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this

>and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike"

Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?

[john-aj]

Learning about phonetics absolutely helps. It provides an accurate way of precisely describing how sounds are pronounced.

Do keep in mind, though, that the IPA classifications that you find on Wikipedia are sometimes rough estimates. With particularly difficult sounds, it may be a good idea to look at multiple phonetic descriptions.

Begin with the sounds of your own native language, which you already know how to pronounce, and try to describe them phonetically. A tip for learning to feel where your tongue is, is to pronounce the sounds without tone, i.e. whisper them, or even without air, i.e. simply mouth them.