I studied English in high school and then at university, but when I talk with native speakers on Discord or Twitch, they tell me I'm not understandable. I listen to podcasts regularly, I watch series in English with French subtitles, but nothing changes. It's frustrating because grammatically I'm doing fine.
I had exactly the same problem when I was in college, I had good grades but as soon as I spoke people would ask me to repeat 😅 The thing is, just listening passively isn't really enough, you actually have to speak out loud while you're studying, imitate the sounds you hear in TV series, check how your mouth moves when you say certain words. A lot of people don't realize that accent isn't just about pronunciation, it's also the rhythm and intonation that you have to actively work on. Try to find someone on Discord or a tutor to do regular pronunciation sessions with, it's way more effective than just consuming content passively 💪
It's not really that 5 years of studying isn't enough, it's more that you learn pronunciation differently than grammar. Listening passively is a good start, but you really gotta force yourself to speak out loud and repeat after native speakers, like sentence by sentence, imitating their rhythm and intonations - not just understanding what they're saying. Like in my field, you gotta pay attention to every detail, and it's the same with accent: you really gotta analyze it, know where you're placing your tongue, how you're modifying your vowels. People on Discord help you identify your issues without meaning to, so take advantage of that to ask specifically what's wrong rather than just "my accent is bad".
The trap is believing that passive watching is enough. It's like delivering packages for 17 years while listening to podcasts about technique - you're not gonna get faster just by hearing people talk about speed. Pronunciation is a muscle, you gotta activate it.
Where everyone messes up: they don't work on targeted phonetics. You probably have English sounds you never made in French (the 'th', the rolled vs non-rolled 'r', the diphthongs), and hearing them pass by in a TV series isn't enough to pick them up. You really gotta isolate them, listen to them slowed down, then reproduce them out loud. Look for specific resources like Forvo or YouTube videos on English phoneme pronunciation. Spend 15-20 minutes a day just on that, not binge-watching series.
Then force yourself to actually speak. Discord is cool but a lot of people don't listen carefully. Try conversation apps or conversation groups where people actually correct you. Grammar is the foundation, yeah, but if your accent makes words unrecognizable, there's no point having perfect sentences. In 17 years I know you gotta practice actively to really progress, not just kill time. Apply that to your accent and it should move.
You really gotta practice speaking out loud on your own before you talk with native speakers, like record yourself reading simple texts and listen back to spot where it sounds weird. The thing nobody tells you is that most people just learn to recognize the accent without ever actually imitating it with their own mouth, and it changes everything when you start actively practicing your pronunciation instead of just passively soaking it up.
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