[throwaway81523]

I'm a native English speaker and one thing that helped me with other languages (let's say French) was the simple-in-retrospect idea of trying to speak French with a French accent. I.e. I know what French-accented English sounds like and I can imitate it, but it was sort of an epiphany to realize that the accent came from native French pronunciation habits. So if I pronounced French words with that same accent, rather than sounding silly and affected, it sounded like was supposed to.

My French is pretty limited but native speakers have told me that my pronunciation is good. I credit it to this one simple trick. To use it for English though, I guess it helps to have encountered native English speakers trying to speak your language, so you know what their accent is like.

Other than that, I guess it could help to work with a coach with ESL training, maybe for an hour per week or whatever. I'm sure you can find someone on Craigslist like that.

[pictureofabear]

I found this to be helpful in talking to non-native speakers as well actually. I lived in Japan for several years (and did not speak Japanese), and noticed that Japanese had many loan words from English whose phonemes had been bent to the more rigid Japanese phonemes. Words like "toilet" and "milk" in Japanese are "toi ray" and "miriku." Turns out there are many more and speaking with a faux-Japanese accent made it noticeably easier for Japanese listeners to understand what you were trying to say.

Yes, from an American-perspective, it felt slightly disrespectful at first to do this, but the results were positive.

[throwaway81523]

Do you mean that speaking English with a Japanese accent made it easier for Japanese people to understand you? That is interesting and I guess it makes sense, though I'd have a hard time bringing myself to do it, for the reason you mention. Heh.