This paper reports research which first examines the limits in attaining phonological competence of foreign language learners who have not resided in a target language community, and second, attempts to identify factors which explain variance in this competence. After rating fifty-two samples from 67 participants, the results showed that EFL learners were able to attain a near-native like pronunciation for all but sentences. The factors which explained individual difference in pronunciation attainment were self rated musical ability, attitudes toward learning pronunciation, length of time spent learning the language and strategy use.