First impressions
Pronunciation is definitely the biggest thing that people notice when you are speaking English. Let us tell you a personal anecdote about this:
We once went to a conversation class taught by native speakers (Americans). Before the class started, the teacher said to us: "So, do you speak good English?". Tom replied "We think so", and the guy said "It sure sounds like you do".
Notice that we just said three words, and the teacher could already tell if our English was good or bad. Why did the teacher think our English was good? Because of the difficult words we used? No. Because we used advanced grammar structures? No. It was our pronunciation.