Native pronunciation is a misleading priority

I do that in my spare time, not in class.

My Spanish tutor from years ago spoke with a distinct Castilian accent that sounds to most of Latin America as if he has a lisp. My Thai tutor has an Isan accent. Others are similarly not perfect.

But I know can practice perfect Mexican Spanish accent and specifically CDMX accent from a YouTube channel with over 500 videos. My central Thai accent comes from endless practice with online resources, not in the 60 minutes a day that I have with my tutor (and most people can't afford one-on-one daily so they don't even have 60 minutes a day). But my computer is infinitely patient and available 24/7 for me to rewind and wait for me to repeat something 20 times until I get it right. At zero cost.

A girl watches a video on a laptop. Illustration photo by Unsplash/Giovanni Gagliardi

Interactive conversation is another red herring. These days artificial intelligence can do back-and-forth conversations with you in a neutral accent and is more witty, more patient, available 24/7, less expensive (or even free) for an infinite number of topics without ever being tired, impatient, or prohibitively expensive. I'm using GPT-4o but Claude and others also have it.

If I were learning English today, I would only hire teachers who are bilingual in English and one of the languages I already knew. For a Vietnamese student, that would be someone bilingual in English and Vietnamese. Just be honest with yourself. If you were learning Japanese from scratch today, would you want a monolingual Japanese speaker who can't speak English to try explain to you IN JAPANESE why verbs come after objects in a Japanese sentence and why some sentences have a mix of hiragana and kanji while other sentences do not (and the same sentence also would not have that mix in another context). The teacher's explanation in Japanese would be of no help when you don't know Japanese.

Native pronunciation and interactive conversations used to be justifications for monolingual language teachers (a questionable justification due to class time limitation) but even there, technology has taken care of that issue.