[maxton]

I think the bit about imitating a foreign accent in order to sound more like a native in your target language is one of the better pieces of advice in this post; at least, doing so has worked pretty well for me in the languages I’ve tried to study so far.

It’s not always a benefit to quickly pick up the phonology, though. When native speakers hear a foreigner speaking with such a non-foreign accent, they tend to assume that I know the language a lot better than I really do, and I find myself asking people to slow down and repeat quite often...