Your last point is one of my long-standing pet-peeves about language teaching methods. It seems the universally accepted practice is to give students mountains of vocabulary to study, grammar rules that make no sense, and a little bit of speaking practice.

It is no wonder that native speakers of language X have a characteristic accent when speaking in a different language. When they try to read a word in the foreign language, they default to their native language's pronunciation heuristics.

That is completely backwards from how children learn languages. They are exposed to the sounds and intuitively figure out the rest.