Hello guys, I work in a call center and I have to answer incoming phone calls from Americans. Since I started to take calls I have noticed how disgusting a strong accent is for people from USA. So I started to try to improve my pronunciation using dictionaries and books and I have notice a positive answer from Americans. Sometimes I talk with people from China or India and I realized that I have to do an extra effort to understand them. For the record I'm a Spanish native speaker and English is not so different compared to my language. I would certainly take care of the recommendations about learning pronunciation here if I had to speak with native English speakers.