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Well, I’ve never had too much of a problem with Scots-English (even spoken by people from Glasgow!)
But Newcastle-English can be quite tricky - I’ll freely admit that! ;-D
I was referring to Scottish people. It’s not incorrect or rude to call them “Scots”, is it?
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Yes, I’ve seen it mentioned before, but that wasn’t what I was referring to.
@Peter
@Imyirtseshem
Well, the Scots who speak Scots, the Welsh who (in some cases!) speak Welsh, and the English who speak English.
Or the Scottish people who…etc, etc…! 
Well I know for sure that there are many Germans unable to understand Natives from Switzerland - or Southern Germans/Austrians unable to understand German Natives from the North. Of course, they may be able to communicate, but it’s actually quite common in German TV that speakers of certain areas are subtitled or even dubbed. Not that I think that this is a nice habit of TV stations, but obviously they figure it’s necessary, so it can’t be so easy for every Native to understand people from other areas.
Yes, I have heard that Germans (or Austrians) can’t understand more than about 40% of Swiss-German!
(But I guess you might argue that Swiss-German is actually a completely different language from Hochdeutsch?)
JayB, I’m the wrong person to answer that. I was raised in Swabia (in the very south of Germany). The Swabian dialect is rather close to Swiss-German (or: somewhere in between Swiss-German and Hochdeutsch), so I don’t have as many problems understanding Swiss-German than most other Germans… in fact they might have problems to understand my home dialect. 
You’ve gotta be kidding, Chinese is the most difficult language to me.
@Fingergut
That’s very interesting. Actually the person who told me that she couldn’t understand much of the Swiss-German dialect is a friend of mine who is a native German speaker from Augsburg. However the Augsburg-dialect is a kind of mixture between Bavarian and Swabian, isn’t it?
To be honest, when I was living down in those parts, most of the folks I knew seemed to prefer speaking Hochdeutsch. One of them actually had a policy of speaking Hochdeutsch only with his children, because he considered dialects to be unsophisticated! (I swear that’s the truth! :-0)
@JayB: Yes, Augsburg is at the very border of those two dialects (the Inn is considered the border). Likewise, there is not one Swiss-German dialect. The people at Lake Constance talk different compared to those in Zurich or Basel. But e.g. at Lake Constance, where Austria, Germany and Switzerland adjoin, the connecting dialects are melting of course. Dialects follow national borders only to a certain degree (due to focus on different capitals and their media).
I have always been interested in and fascinated by dialects, so I think it’s rather sad that so many dialect speakers are ashamed of their dialects. (I’m a “switcher” by the way, I’m always unconsciously adjusting to my surrounders.)
@JayB
Here is this little conversation on Schwizerdütsch, by the way 
Schweizerdeutsch Sprechen - Language Forum @ LingQ
Thanks for the link, Eugrus
Personally my problem is not one of dialects, it’s with languages that lend themselves to mashing sounds together. My landlord spoke the same dialect as everyone else around me and I was quite well familiar with it, but I could not discern the individual words he said.
To my ears, Quebec dialect and standard French are similarly difficult to understand. Ironically I feel my only hope of ever understanding French are the Quebec sitcoms that have subtitles in standard French! Finally I know what these people are saying, written out before me in words I recognize!
To give an example in English, to a non-native speaker or in certain situations to a native speaker, I would say, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” To a native speaker I might say, “I dunno whatchur talking bout.” I get a good laugh watching TV at the gym, where the shows are transcribed. Sometimes the transcriptions have bizarre mistakes where entirely wrong but similar sounding words were put in, and I just hope they had the transcription done by computer and just didn’t care to have a human edit it, rather than hire someone who wasn’t proficient in English to transcribe a US TV program broadcast in the US.
I read this thread discussing why French is so hard to understand. Why can't I understand spoken french?? | WordReference Forums I agree with all these people. Except for the French person telling people that it isn’t that hard. Yea right…
Anyway, this post I think nails it for me:
"1. it’s difficult to hear when one word ends and another begins, due to liaisons and the general tendency of the French to “smooth out” the ending of words.
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Many vowel distinctions that exist in other languages have been lost e.g. “sent”, “sans”, “son” all sound pretty much the same to a non-native, “boue” and “bu” are also confusing similar, and so on. One therefore has to subconsciously reverse-engineer the sentence using semantic clues while you are listening.
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The rhythm of the language differs from English - we tend to listen for clues to meaning “at the wrong time”
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Many letters are simply not pronounced (e.g. as in “sent” and “sans” above) leading to large numbers of homophones (or pronounced occasionally which is even more confusing e.g. “ils boivent beaucoup” v “ils boivent aux dames”)"
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Even natives may have a hard time distinguishing Provence and province if the words are said quickly and depending on where they’re from. In the north, whatever that means from a southerner’s point of view, I’ve heard say that they pronounce “brun” and “brin” the same, whereas there’s a big difference for me. On the other hand, words like “top” and “taupe” or all the -é, -er, -ez, -et, -ai, -ais/t and some -ê and -è sound the same to my ears (big issue when it comes to writing).
You know, understanding spoken English is also very difficult for French, even though we’re exposed to it a lot (at least a lot more than any other language). All those little words, those contractions… It seems impossible at first. Listening is the key. I’ve done it, though I can’t say I get 100% of what I hear yet.
Spoken French is also quite different from written French, therefore maybe learners are less prepared for colloquial speech. If everybody wrote “do not” in English, then learners would struggle more with the spoken form. If, maybe, people saw “J’sais/Ch’ais pas” or “qu’est-ce t’as fait”, it would be easier for them when listening to spoken French. And once again, it’s the same with English. Those issues don’t exist, or are less present anyway, in other languages.
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