Learning a language is difficult, but everyone can do it. One huge hurdle that many people can overcome with some effort is the mechanics and rules of the language itself. Learning the grammar and spelling rules, punctuation rules, and more, is a long term and rewarding process that is largely natural for our minds. We’re great at “chunking” information and learning new rules, especially when we’ve already got a similar framework in our neural connections, like our first language!
Many people spend months or years learning a new language, only to find out when they attempt to use it that they can’t communicate effectively with other native speakers of their learned language due to pronunciation issues. We’ve all had an embarassing moment with someone speaking our native language where we’ve had to say “What, What, What?” over and over again. It is rarely the usage of the language that is the problem, its most often a thick accent!
Of course the accent is a problem! It is a published fact that people can only distinguish certain sounds particular to their language while they’re under 6 months old. If you weren’t exposed to that language as an infant, you may not even be able to hear the issues with your pronounciation. Luckily, these types of very subtle sounds are very few, and you can make considerable headway in the majority of the language’s pronounciation if you listen very carefully and try to get “over the humps” in your learning.
Listening carefully is simple, everyone can do it. Pay special attention to the sound that other native speakers are producing. Spend time on youtube looking for foreign languages, get an Internet friend that won’t mind talking on Skype, or get some TV or movies dubbed into the language you’re looking to improve in. Don’t focus at all on what they’re saying, listen to HOW they’re saying it. Imagine that there are no words, and you’re only looking for the building blocks of an encoded system that you’re going to catalog and decipher. By forcing your brain away from “chunking”, which is its natural mode of learning by grouping things into understandable “chunks” you can focus on whats really important on eliminating your accent. The small things! 
A quick aside on “chunking” and an interesting view into how our brains work…did you know that when presented with a chess board with natural placement, as if a game had been played by two skilled players, a chess pro can memorize and reproduce the chessboard configuration in seconds? Randomly place those pieces, and they can’t do it at all! This is VERY important for realising both how our brains learn best, and how to force yourself into a new viewpoint/method. Take away the chunks and you’re forcing yourself out of your brains natural mode to map the new language to the old one, which in the case of accents is causing part of our problem! Listen to the sounds, don’t map it, force yourself to learn that brand new landscape.
Getting over humps, or getting over the wall, something EVERY musician and athlete knows about. If you’re used to doing physical things that require a lot of coordination, you know all about running into walls and getting over them. If you’re the intellectual type, you might have experienced this in a different way, as an “everything just came together!” or “a-ha! eureka!” moment. This is the precise moment, usually after an unrelated activity like relaxing or sleeping, where everything clicks and we can, after much frustration, finally do what we’ve had our sights set on. The frustration period is your brain building the necessary pathways to achieve your goals, you’re basically under construction. Once the building is done you’re off and running. You’ve got to allow yourself some time of frustration and difficulty, and your reward for persistence will be that you will receive the bliss that is finally being able to do the thing you’ve been striving for. This works for everything, not just accents, but the point is that you mustn’t give up and say “I just can’t get the accent right” you’ve got to perservere over MANY walls and humps to achieve your goal of talking like a native. It takes years of constant improvement, but when the first person asks you “What? You’re not from my home country??” it will all have been worth it!
