I don’t care if my mispronounciations are perfectly understood by Japanese people. I don’t care if my mispronunciations are 99% correct. If I can’t sound native, I might as well give up. I wish I had learned Japanese in childhood because children pick up pronunciation effortlessly!
It’s hard to look at diagrams of the mouth, charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and then position my tongue accurately!
I am trilingual, and while that makes it easier for me to learn new pronunciation than a monolingual person, it certainly doesn’t guarantee flawless articulation because while being multilingual exposes a person to more sounds, it doesn’t expose them to every possible sound that a human being can create.
As if said consonants weren’t hard enough to say, I also feel deaf to pitch accent!
I am sorry for the angry tone of my post, but it is what it is.