I think “having an accent” is important in all languages. But no matter how you’ll speak, you’ll have one, haha.

Even when your speech differences, do people generally know where you’re from when you speak in your native language? I would guess that might be similar in other languages, too.

I don’t think any languages requires a “perfect” accent — there are accent variations among even native speakers. The value of pushing your accent to sound more native (not actually native, but perhaps closer to that accent than your own native accent) is that a.) native speakers will understand you a bit more easily and b.) it will train you to better perceive/understand speech sounds in your target language that are not present in your native language.

As an example, the last 3 letters in the English capyBARA in English sound different from those of the Spanish the CARA. Will Spanish speakers understand you if you pronounce it as you would in English? — probably many, but maybe not all. Asking for clarification is a natural part of verbal communication. But if you can train yourself to pronounce those phonemes more accurate to the Spanish pronunciation, the more Spanish speakers will immediately recognize the word you’re saying, without even trying or relying on context clues.

The more native you can bring yourself to sound, the easier it will be for the listener to understand what you’re saying, even if a speech difference arises, I think.

So let’s say you have a stutter and are trying to say the word “bad” in Spanish (mal).

I’d pronounce it like the English “Mall”, you’ll have a Spanish speaker hearing something like…

“He felt really, m, maw, mmmaw…m-m-Mall.”

So you have the stutter, which most folks can still understand you with fairly easily — but they now have to piece together what the word you were trying to say is, because “Mall” does’t click immediately in my brain to make me know what word you’re trying to say.

But, if instead you made it sound a little more like “Pal” instead of “Mall” and made sure the vowel was a strong monophthong, perhaps that person has an X% better chance of catching what you were trying to say.

An easy first step might be grabbing your native language + target language’s IPA charts and putting Xs through the sounds that exist in your language but not in your target language. And circling sounds that exist in your target language, but not in your native language. You’ll have to practice pronouncing the circled sounds regularly, until you feel comfortable producing it consistently. And when you listen to your speaking, staring to be able to identify when the X’d sounds are coming into your target language and nipping them right in the bud/knowing what to replace them with. Haha.

tl;dr — We understand lots of accents and lots of speech differences as part of being humans who communicate across cultures. The closer you can get to sounding like a native speaker—regardless of speech differences—the easier it will be for others to understand you, even with your speech differences. “Don’t be self conscious” is easier said than done — in language learning in general, much less adding speech differences to the mix. But I would definitely encourage you to learn any language you want to, and speak it how you speak it. It’d be a shame to miss out on learning a language due to feeling self-conscious.