Btw, Steve’s word “attuned” is better than my word “acclimated”…
I didn’t know that a southern accent was desirable in show business, but I have been hearing more southern-spiced accents recently. Shep Smith, on Fox, has a southern accent. His “r” gives him away.
Maitee, I think it is the influence of country and western, as well as african-american,music on all popular music, that has so many singers drifting towards some kind of southern accent when they sing.
Given that most of the TV programmes one can watch are from America, I am not all that surprised if someone cannot recognize English accents from Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.
Have you watched Inglorious Basterds yet? Besides being a great comic book/action WWII movie, if you’ve seen any other Brad Pitt movie you could easily compare, and I don’t know how you couldn’t tell there’s some difference. Also, though Brad Pitt does a good job, it should be noted that his accent, on purpose, is a little ‘cartoony’ considering the kind of movie it was and his director…
The only Spanish accent I can distinguish is Argentinian, and that’s because I hear a different rhythm in the way it’s spoken rather than pronunciation differences. So I’m with you, I can’t really distinguish between accents in the languages I’m learning at all 
I didn’t really like Inglorious Bastards, it had some great parts but they were spaced very far apart and the movie in general was very slow and drawn out.
Blindside, I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m going to as soon as I can. I’ve seen Brad Pitt more or less recently in Benjamin Button and in an interview with Larry King. I find him a little difficult to understand, but I’m not sure why, since I listen to/watch a lot of interviews and I’m able to understand most of them quite well. Maybe he speaks too fast or does not pronounce things very clearly, I don’t know.
That’s true, Peter. We have access to “the real deal” up here, and while I probably didn’t have any idea of Irish/Scottish/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand varieties when I started learned English in fourth grade (1983!), I definitely knew how American and British English sounded, from day one. (on a basic level: rhotic/non-rhotic, [æ]/[ɑː] etc.) Some of these differences are more or less present in Swedish too (we have many kinds of /r/ and vowel allophones), so that may have “helped”.
I’m Italian and I can recognise which zone of my country someone came from.
I am from the southern Italy, then, above all, I am able to recognise the southern accents. The ability to understand where people came from is very common in Italy perhaps because our accents are very strong. It cames directly from the dialects, of course.
I can’t recognise accents in English, I am not still a good listener.
Antonio, I can recognise some of the many Brazilian accents too, although some of them I can only recognise the approximate region from which they come, not the exact state. And about the Portuguese spoken in foreign countries, I recognise the Portugal accent, but it can be difficult to distinguish it from those of some African countries.
You know what is funny?, after all this discussion, your message made me notice that I can’t recognise very well accents even in my own native language, simply because I’m not used to them…
Definitely, exposure is what I need!!!
I am in love with different accents.
I can usually tell the difference between English accents…most except for New Zealand and some of the British varieties…
I’ve looked everywhere online trying to learn the Scottish accent and New York accent…but resources are few and far in between…I believe I posted on the LingQ forum once or twice asking people for content in other English accents…
Does anybody know some great websites for learning different dialects? Or books?
I would love to be able to pull off a flawless Brooklyn dialect or Scottish hahaha
As for my native tongue…Korean…I can usually identify different dialects…the Busan dialect being the most obviously different with its intonation…the other regions have their own dialects but I usually can’t pick them up because it seems they have their own words that are not used in the standard “Seoul” dialect and not so much a different intonation that would make the difference more obvious…oh and although I’ve never heard it, I hear the Cheju island dialect is wacko…or at least quite different from the “standard” dialect…
To Anapaula, exposure is, of course, the best method to recognize accents… the risk is that after much exposure you speak like them 
To LinguaFranca, two great archives of English accents coming from all over the word are shown in the first page of this forum and I found this BBC - Voices some mounths ago.
You’re right, Antonio, you end up incorporating some things if you hear too much of any accent. In my own native language I experience a funny phenomenon. I’m originally from Rio state, where the accent is very strong and easily recognizable everywhere in Brazil. But I lived in other four states for some years now, with quite different accents, but even after more or less 15 years living out of Rio, people know I’m from there after the second phrase I say. When I’m in Rio, though, my family thinks I’m speaking strangely and my nephews make jokes about my “new” accent.
In other words, I guess I have my own, personal all-mixed accent nowadays… lol
Thanks for the link!