Why is it so difficult to learn the proper accent in multiple languages?

#38, there's a similar effect with the Ukrainian cellphone compay Kievstar. Their cyrillic logo uses a cursive style that lloks like Kievcrap.

Returinng to OP, you can learn about common accents by listening to how native speakers impersonate foreigners.

For example, I am a native English speaker. If I want to put on a mock French accent, I pronounce all i's long and change voiced th to z: zees leetl seeng = this little thing. Look on you tube for episodes of "allo allo", a TV comedy heavily reliant or huour on mock French accents.

If I want to sound Italian, I omit the apsiration on t's and p's. (I understood this distinction only when I learned Georgian, in which aspirated and unapsirated consonants co-exist and are distinct)

If I want to pretend to be Indian, I retorflex all my consonants, If I want to sound Russian I replace Engish h with kh. And so on.

I can understand why language teachers don't go through all of iviehoff's excellent list in Lesson 1. Most students would probably respond by saying "I'll never learn this!" and give up. And if you're only going to have a year of French (say), it really doesn't matter whether or not you aspirate your initial p's. That will be the least of your problems trying to get by in French.

And perhaps then the problem is that there isn't any particularly logical place to introduce these ideas. Why in Lesson 20 and not Lesson 50?

Another problem is the silly prejudice language teachers have against reference to the student's native language. It would make sense to teach this by contrast to the native language if possible, and I think schools of education still generally discourage that. Still, at some point good teachers will do everything iviehoff recommends. And not many teachers do.

Well said iviehoff #39. Good description. Captures well all the frustrations I've had with language learning. To learn subtle sound differences, you need a teacher with native pronunciation in two languages - both the one you'd like to learn and the one in which you're taught, so you can detect the differences. Few teachers can do this.

I must say that living in Scotland for so long has eventually got me using some long-dormant mouth muscles - which has helped a bit with some foreign pronunciations.

I omit the apsiration on t's and p's

Which then sounds a bit like d and b to Anglophones

As one who was never taught any foreign language except Latin for a few years, and gets by on scraps of phrasebook and overheard sentences, I find it best not to imitate the host's pronunciation too closely.

It's often better to signal your foreignness with a bad accent - people take a bit more care in replying to you.

To learn subtle sound differences, you need a teacher with native pronunciation in two languages

I've told this story before. Apologies to old hands.

In an elementary Turkish class, my classmates and I were having a hard time hearing the sound of Turkish v (which I think is a voiced bilabial fricative, as in Spanish). "Is that a w or a v?" someone asked. "It's a wee," came the answer (or so it sounded to our ears).

To learn subtle sound differences, you need a teacher with native pronunciation in two languages - both the one you'd like to learn and the one in which you're taught, so you can detect the differences.

Fortunately this is not true. If it were true, there would never be enough adequate language teachers to go around.

The sound differences are not so subtle once you are attuned to hearing them. A good linguist should be able to demonstrate them without being native in both languages. Trouble is many of the people employed in language education never even learned how to do it.

In an elementary Turkish class, my classmates and I were having a hard time hearing the sound of Turkish v (which I think is a voiced bilabial fricative, as in Spanish). "Is that a w or a v?" someone asked. "It's a wee," came the answer (or so it sounded to our ears).

This happens also when English people listen to certain German-native speakers, who can sound to native English speakers as if they are reversing v and w when speaking English. Of course they aren't. What is actually happening, for example, is that the Turk or German produces a v-sound native to his sound-world which doesn't sound sufficiently like a v to the English speaker to be categorised in the English v-box, when you were expecting a v, so it gets put in the w-box, which it is sufficiently close to when you weren't expecting it.

If you were actually to be taught the mouth movements required to produce the sound, then you would start producing the sound itself, or a close approximation. You would then hear it enough to start to perceive it as a different specific sound and construct a concept of Turkish-v-box in your auditory perception.

My own anecdote in this area is an old student friend of mine who had gone to visit a friend in Spain, and went to the local shop, of the old-fashioned variety where you have to ask for things, which was common in Spain in those days. She had been fore-armed with the names of the required items in Spanish, in the form of an approximate pronunciation using English phonemes. But two items on the shopping list she could not obtain, as her production of the words harina (flour) and papel (paper) using English phonemes failed to elicit any comprehension from the shopkeeper. Likewise my own early visits to Spain I had considerable difficulty understanding Spaniards when they used words with the letters p or t in them, which I just couldn't recognise when they used them.

...certain German-native speakers...can sound...as if they are reversing v and w when speaking English.

Slavs can do the same thing. When my Russian grandmother realized that I thought a samovar was a huge container for tea, she told me that I was mistaken. A very small amount of very strong tea was poured from a china teapot, and boiling water from the samovar was then added to dilute it to the strength preferred by the drinker.

"That's a lot of trouble to go to just to boil water," I said. "Why not just boil water on the stove?"

My grandmother replied in her heavily accented English, "How do you take a stow to the voots?"