Somewhere early on, somebody told you the goal was to sound native.
Not to be understood. Not to be able to say what you mean. To be indistinguishable — for somebody to hear you and not know.
Put it down. It's the most expensive goal in language learning and almost nobody who chases it ever gets to speak.
Where the Pressure Comes From
Accent perfectionism is sold as ambition. It arrives dressed up as taking the language seriously.
What it actually does is hand you a reason not to speak yet. If the target is indistinguishable, every sentence you produce today falls short, and the sensible move is always to wait and practise more. The bar is set so high that silence becomes the rational choice.
Meanwhile the person with an obvious accent, who started talking in month two, is three years ahead of you and having conversations.
Nobody Is Grading You
Here's what actually happens when you speak with an accent.
They understand you. They answer. The conversation continues. Occasionally somebody asks where you're from, which is a friendly question and not an accusation.
What does not happen is anybody thinking less of you. Consider how you react to somebody speaking your own language with an accent. You don't wince. You don't score them. If anything you're quietly impressed they're doing it at all, in your language, while you make no comparable effort in theirs.
Extend yourself the same courtesy.
What Does Need to Be Right
There's a real distinction underneath this and it's worth being precise about.
Sounding native is cosmetic. Being intelligible is not. If a sound doesn't exist in your first language, your mouth has never made it — and if you never make it, you'll be misheard rather than merely accented. That is worth practising, and it's a motor skill. It develops by moving your mouth, not by listening harder.
So practise the sounds. Abandon the accent. Two different projects, and only one of them matters.
The Accent Was Never the Barrier
Ask anybody who speaks a second language well what stopped them for years. Not one of them will say pronunciation.
They'll say they were afraid to start, that the fear had a respectable name — wanting to do it properly — and that the day they let themselves sound foreign was the day they began.
Your accent is the sound of having gone to the trouble. Keep it.
About Outputly
Outputly trains the physical production of the sounds — mouth, breath and rhythm, guided by the song, at conversational speed. It makes no attempt to erase where you're from. It just makes sure you're understood.