Among my current group of friends I'm the only one who can even somewhat consistently use gender-neutral pronouns and I still have trouble sometimes, despite working to incorporate them into my vocabulary for more than a decade. I just don't stop to think when I reach for a pronoun in every day conversation. Swapping to "they" is easy for me in a way that "zie" or other options aren't, but I know for other people it isn't. (I grew up in a place where, for some reason, people routinely used "they" as a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun.) However, for other people who didn't hear it used that way, it isn't going to be in the "bucket 'o pronouns" when they reach for a pronoun.
I do think exposure to other people using the correct pronouns helps, and possibly helps more than corrections. Corrections don't necessarily lead to internalized "this is how that word is used". That is, I don't think it's necessarily personal to them. Obviously it is personal to you, and reminding them of that may provide the motivation for them to figure out some way to add this pronoun to their vocabulary, but they might not know how to do that and if they don't have some technique that works all the reminders in the world won't succeed. On the other hand, if there is some way to immerse them in a world where "they" is a 3rd person singular pronoun it will eventually start sounding normal.
I do think language learning and modification is a skill. When I was learning German, my German teacher had us recite conjugated verbs over and over in a sing-song voice until they just started to sound right. That's the approach I took with zie, practicing using it until it stopped sounding notable. If I don't use it for a while, I lose that sense of normalcy, but if I hadn't had experience with a technique that worked for me I don't even know how I'd have gone about it in that first place.
no subject
I do think exposure to other people using the correct pronouns helps, and possibly helps more than corrections. Corrections don't necessarily lead to internalized "this is how that word is used". That is, I don't think it's necessarily personal to them. Obviously it is personal to you, and reminding them of that may provide the motivation for them to figure out some way to add this pronoun to their vocabulary, but they might not know how to do that and if they don't have some technique that works all the reminders in the world won't succeed. On the other hand, if there is some way to immerse them in a world where "they" is a 3rd person singular pronoun it will eventually start sounding normal.
I do think language learning and modification is a skill. When I was learning German, my German teacher had us recite conjugated verbs over and over in a sing-song voice until they just started to sound right. That's the approach I took with zie, practicing using it until it stopped sounding notable. If I don't use it for a while, I lose that sense of normalcy, but if I hadn't had experience with a technique that worked for me I don't even know how I'd have gone about it in that first place.