Vietnamese / any language: one year just on pronunciation?

[Guest realmayo]

I'm starting learning some Vietnamese, on my own outside Vietnam and under no time pressure. Doing 30 minutes a day. I'm thinking about the mistakes I made when starting out in Chinese, which has led me to decide that I want my absolute priority to be pronunciation: there are plenty of (to my ears ) exotic, unusual and hard-to-distinguish sounds (both vowels and consonants) in Vietnamese, which make this important.

Now, I reckon before I can speak out these sounds, I need to be able to distinguish how they actually sound. So the past couple of months I've been listening to the sounds and words, comparing them with each other, and listening to some basic dialogues. So actually the title of this post is misleading: so far I've done say 95% listening and 5% reading (reading the dialogues).

Next step will be to try to find a native speaker to teach me speaking: hopefully someone ruthlessly critical and pedantic.

And I'm just curious what people think about this approach, particularly given the fact that, as I said, it's very much part-time and I'm in no hurry.