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by scyzoryk_xyz 968 days ago
Practice and willingness to fail and clown around is key. As an english teacher I've always liked to bring up cross-lingual interference - you're always going to accidentally bring in sounds from your own language into the one you're learning.

I'm no linguist, but English has also drawn a lot from other neighboring languages. Understanding a bit of French, Dutch or German helps a lot with understanding which English words are pronounced in which way. It's not random is what I mean.

I once knew a EU parlament translator and linguist with 6+ languages under his belt. When he visited us in Poland he would not shut up - he tried reading every sign, every word, kept asking how it's pronounced. Just continuously played with language, like a software developer does with code. When he was leaving after a two day stay he had a lot of Polish quite well figured out, it was really impressive. But he was just really willing to fail over and over and over in all social interactions.