For those who think this is a cop out; it is known that for most people the ability to learn new languages changes around puberty. The ability to learn, recognize and pronounce phonemes changes when kids are very young. Babies brains are flexible and can be shaped in many ways. Adults, not so much.
It is not impossible for all to learn this type of 'skill'. It is more difficult for many, and impossible for some.
My personal belief is that we retain the ability to learn new languages. The issue is that modern schooling has trained us to try and learn in counter-productive ways.
I believe we can learn languages by (1) concentrating on mimicking and (2) learning by speaking with others and being continuously corrected by others.
The problem is that is requires a tremendous amount of work for learner and teacher.
Think how a baby or child learns and do as much of that as possible.
Initially absolutely avoid all reading, and totally avoid learning any rules.
Improve your general ability of mimicking skills e.g. by copying singers and songs, by copying famous people in the foreign language, mimicking accents or people in your own mother tongue.
People with English as their mother tongue have some advantages - we actually recognise a huge variety of vowel sounds because various English accents contain them - we also have familiarity with a variety of grammatical constructs. We also know pronunciation and writing are completely disjoint: anyone coming from a language where you say what you read has a big disadvantage.
Much of my belief comes from talking with people that have English as their second language, and looking for their successes and failures. Some people learn English well and it's interesting to look for why them? Some mistakes are common to particular groups and it's interesting to look for the root cause.
I have applied some of the above to teach myself conversational Spanish. To test my beliefs I'm definitely keen to move onto something more difficult ( I'm middle aged): the block is that I will need to dedicate many months of effort living in another country.
> People with English as their mother tongue have some advantages - we actually recognise a huge variety of vowel sounds because various English accents contain them
Not so sure about that. For example, I noticed it takes a bit of effort to get native English speakers to pronounce the ы sound, or to get them to hear how the ь letter affects pronunciation.
> We also know pronunciation and writing are completely disjoint: anyone coming from a language where you say what you read has a big disadvantage.
I don't quite agree. I come from a language where the spelling is almost phonetic (so, not totally disjoint from pronunciation), and it's very easy for children to learn reading and writing, which means they quickly move on to more important things.
Meanwhile, children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly.
And conversely, when they hear a new word (or name) they need to look up how to spell it.
I don't see an advantage, it's just a waste of energy.
It was relatively easy for me to learn the spelling of English words because I already knew a reasonable amount of French, so it was quite intuitive to spell "restaurant" or "renaissance". But for someone with English as a first language, I suspect it would have involved a lot of memorising.
> I noticed it takes a bit of effort to get native English speakers to pronounce the ы sound, or to get them to hear how the ь letter affects pronunciation.
But you are saying English speakers can learn it? How do Romance language speakers do? I'm just making a generalisation, which is not universal and there are plenty of vowel and consonant sounds English speakers really struggle to learn.
> children learning English as a first language are stuck memorising spelling and obscure rules and exceptions just to be able to write correctly.
Absolutely: it is a serious downside of English and plenty of adults never learn to spell well. I have seen the advantages of saying it like it is spelled in Spanish. But that isn't relevant to my point that English speakers have a natural understanding that spelling is disjoint from pronunciation. It maybe doesn't help much - hearing English speakers saying words they have learnt from books is painful!
Secondly, many English speakers often try to pronounce foreign names correctly - another habit that teaches us pronunciation (a little!)
It is not impossible for all to learn this type of 'skill'. It is more difficult for many, and impossible for some.