Yeah, the phonetics can be far harder. I struggle to even make out discrete words in spoken Dutch despite finding it quite easy to read.

For Danish, it's so similar to Norwegian it's a lot easier, but there's an old Norwegian joke that Danish is just Norwegian spoken with a potato in your mouth... To us, Danish sounds like they're failing to enunciate every single sound...

Incidentally, pronunciation got a lot easier to me when I started looking at mouth placement of natives when speaking. Just watching and copying mouth placement and movements have fixed so many pronunciation issues for me that no amount of listening and repeting could address.