is pronunciation of foreign languages really harder for us-americans?

as a german, i learned english and french in high school (and some russian in uni). the right pronunciation was something that the teachers also focused on, so i would say i learned to manage that quite okay. living in berlin, i've become friends with a bunch of us-americans and i also consume us-american media frequently. i often stumble upon their quite poor pronunciation of names and other words that are not english. i talked about this with one us-american friend and he said that, because of the way english is pronounced, it's just harder for him than for germans. it's hard for me to believe that and i honestly feel like he isn't really trying (which he obviously doesn't get too many chances to do while not learning any language currently). also, german and english come from the same language family, so french is about equally far away. some germans speak a very german accented english of course, but many become really good at it, too. i feel like it's not impossibly hard to learn new sounds from languages like spanish, french or russian, if you really give it a try and don't just get away with it. obviously, it's also a culture thing "to get away with it". with fashion brand names for example, they get americanized (through rap music for example) and people start pronouncing them that way even when they are fluent in the origin language. so, what are your thoughts on this?

edit: i might need to clarify this: a) this friend's laziness in learning his new home country's language for example can't be generalized and b) what i mostly had in mind is names, so this is not about being fluent. i wouldn't germanize someone's name, but it happens to me regularly, even though there's no unknown sounds in anna to an american.