That objecting to the sounds of a language is one of my Portuguese companheira's issues. She often tries to insist that English conform to the European Portuguese sound system, with the result that even after 9 years together, I often have no idea what she's trying to say when she speaks English.
There's another cause of bad pronunciation you didn't mention but which you'll see often enough in the circles of Krashen disciples. That is premature oral production. Or even reading too soon, and getting interference from letter mappings of one's dominant language.
Max Mangold used to advocate an approach similar to the Krashen purists, one which he got from Hitler's interpreter. He listened to many hours of radio broadcasts or other audio without text cues to get immersed in the sound system. Only later did written texts come into play, at a point where trying to read those would not lead to interference from how one's native language might pronounce the letters. Carlos of the "Dreaming Spanish" YouTube channel is particularly adamant on this point. I'm less strict, but I did find that my Spanish pronunciation was largely effortless after I spent most of a year hearing it before trying to read or speak much. (I have the biggest problems due to wide regional sampling from the Americas and Spain so I can understand the mix of Spanishes at an IAPTI meeting better.)
There used to be a series of language orientation kits (book and tapes) that came in a plethora of languages, called The Learnables, which consisted of sequences of cartoon drawings and the tapes narrated them. The book's introduction explicitly instructed the user not to try to repeat any of the language yet, because that could result in a bad accent. We actually found the system pretty effective for Czech, but I see that the series has long been out of print, so somebody probably didn't see the point of it.
I do see a lot of emphasis in early production, but my own attempts with that for Portuguese were a miserable failure beyond a few critical phrases I needed for my local markets and restaurants. When I moved to Portugal 11 years ago, I hired an assistant for handling my business admin and generally greasing the bureaucratic wheels, and she spent many hours having me read aloud from a book her father-in-law wrote about his time vas a human shield in the first Iraq war. And that actually did me more harm than good, because I was not yet even at the stage where I could hear some of the sounds of the language. It took me a couple of years to overcome the damage (bad habits of pronunciation "baked in").
But I think I am a good example of how even an older person with serious hearing deficits can acquire near-native pronunciation. It's not easy, takes time and a lot of good audio examples in different voices, but it can be done. When I got to the point where listeners could still tell I was a foreigner but thought my Portuguese must be better than their English based solely on the evidence of pronunciation, I felt like I had planted a flag on top of Mount Everest.
That objecting to the sounds of a language is one of my Portuguese companheira's issues. She often tries to insist that English conform to the European Portuguese sound system, with the result that even after 9 years together, I often have no idea what she's trying to say when she speaks English.
There's another cause of bad pronunciation you didn't mention but which you'll see often enough in the circles of Krashen disciples. That is premature oral production. Or even reading too soon, and getting interference from letter mappings of one's dominant language.
Max Mangold used to advocate an approach similar to the Krashen purists, one which he got from Hitler's interpreter. He listened to many hours of radio broadcasts or other audio without text cues to get immersed in the sound system. Only later did written texts come into play, at a point where trying to read those would not lead to interference from how one's native language might pronounce the letters. Carlos of the "Dreaming Spanish" YouTube channel is particularly adamant on this point. I'm less strict, but I did find that my Spanish pronunciation was largely effortless after I spent most of a year hearing it before trying to read or speak much. (I have the biggest problems due to wide regional sampling from the Americas and Spain so I can understand the mix of Spanishes at an IAPTI meeting better.)
There used to be a series of language orientation kits (book and tapes) that came in a plethora of languages, called The Learnables, which consisted of sequences of cartoon drawings and the tapes narrated them. The book's introduction explicitly instructed the user not to try to repeat any of the language yet, because that could result in a bad accent. We actually found the system pretty effective for Czech, but I see that the series has long been out of print, so somebody probably didn't see the point of it.
I do see a lot of emphasis in early production, but my own attempts with that for Portuguese were a miserable failure beyond a few critical phrases I needed for my local markets and restaurants. When I moved to Portugal 11 years ago, I hired an assistant for handling my business admin and generally greasing the bureaucratic wheels, and she spent many hours having me read aloud from a book her father-in-law wrote about his time vas a human shield in the first Iraq war. And that actually did me more harm than good, because I was not yet even at the stage where I could hear some of the sounds of the language. It took me a couple of years to overcome the damage (bad habits of pronunciation "baked in").
But I think I am a good example of how even an older person with serious hearing deficits can acquire near-native pronunciation. It's not easy, takes time and a lot of good audio examples in different voices, but it can be done. When I got to the point where listeners could still tell I was a foreigner but thought my Portuguese must be better than their English based solely on the evidence of pronunciation, I felt like I had planted a flag on top of Mount Everest.