I don't think it's fair to make assumptions. I've never counted so I can't be sure, but between the films, TV, radio, and conversations in my years of study I'd estimate I've listened to well over a thousand hours of both French and Italian. Tens of thousands though, probably not!CompImp wrote:I'm betting you've probably done less than 1000 hours of listening practice. You don't have a 'bad ear', that's not possible since everyone can learn at least one language. You just need to put much more time in. Tens of thousands of hours. As i've said, it's not practical for most adults though, or it's not what they want to do anyway.
When I say a "bad ear" I just mean relative to the many people who can imitate just from hearing and speak a language with a good accent either right from the start or after tens to hundreds of hours. I just need to work harder than them, whether that means more study or just more listening, and likewise they might need to work harder (or "spend more time" for those who insist on the difference between "acquiring" and "learning") than me on other aspects like grammar. Yes, I agree that speaking a language even with a great accent after so little time isn't very useful especially if you can't understand the response, but that's completely beside the point in a thread focused on pronunciation.
I think there's sometimes far too much focus on numbers over quality too. I fully agree that thousands of hours of listening are required, and I don't want to argue over differences on what, if anything, should be done in addition to these as that's been discussed to death and there are examples of success with all sorts of methods. But it needs to be said that one must pay plenty attention and know what details to listen for in pronunciation and usage, rather than just passively taking in enough to understand. I think it's a fair estimate that immigrants living in a country for several decades have heard tens of thousands of hours yet many still have strong foreign accents, not to mention weaknesses in other areas of the language, and I imagine a lot of that is because (consciously or not) they just want to get by rather than to master the language and so they don't pay attention to the details.