Do you still rememer the Spaniard Xabi Alonso in Liverpool days?
I’ve seen a couple of his interviews and he’s got scouse accent on his English.
It’s funny to see foreign footballers getting the local accent.
Since I mostly have exposure to American English, BBC Radio 4 sometimes makes me strain myself a bit. Australian sounds a bit unusual, but not hard to understand. Don’t recognize any peculiarities of Canadian accent whatsoever.
I am a big fan of Pygmalion and know that there are lots of inner British English dialects, but I don’t have any exposure to them, so, don’t have much to say on it. At the end of the day, all these differences are extremely tiny when comparing with German dialects, for instance.
Actually I have been working with some mackems. (Sunderland area of England) and I can honestly say I could barely understand a single word. It wasn’t just me either, my colleagues couldn’t understand.
Definitely british is more closed to me because I never used any british content to learn english.
There are countless accents in America, too… Cajun accents will give most everyone who hasn’t spent any time in the Southern U.S. (even other Americans) a lot of trouble… They can get a lot thicker than this example below.
I found some interesting words about accent at http://china232.com/blog/2007/07/:
“The mistakes almost sound natural. It’s the same story with pronunciation. This is just called an accent. We hear them all the time and it’s very easy for us to understand.”
“natural mistakes” → 
I have been told that my accent (English Geordie) is hard to understand. I had a real hard time when I moved to Canada, people were constantly telling to slow down and repeat my self. Now after 6 years of living here I have a Mutt accent!!!
For me I find the Newfoundland and Bretton accents of Canada difficult to understand especially when they have had a few whiskeys!
I think it’s all about exposure. I have no exposure to maritime Canadian accents and when I meet someone from the other side of the country it usually takes a little while to adjust to hearing them. That being said, I am surrounded by non-native English speakers from Asian countries and I have no problem understanding them at all, but they often complain of being completely unintelligible when they go travelling to the states.
My friend from Malaysia is fluent in English, but he grew up in a boarding school in the UK, then moved here. It’s almost impossible for people who don’t know him to understand what he’s saying, because he talks very quickly, but also because he uses British English with a Malaysian accent!
There are no “mistakes” really, especially if an entire group of people are making the same “mistakes”, it just becomes a new speech variety for that language.
As a native English speaker, I find the Indian accent extremely difficult, but of course with every accent there’s people you can easily understand and others you can’t, it really depends on elocution and speed.
I find too that it really only depends on exposure.
i think it’ll be difficult understand Виталий Мутко фром хиз харт - YouTube
:-))))
And don’t ask me - is this russian accent.
When i heard this i laughed as a child.
Both me and skyblueteapot think American English is usally the hardest to understand ;-D
While nobody would think that Vitalij is a native English speaker, I have no problems understanding him. It’s not uncommon at all for people (regardless of nationality) to have a thick accent like that.
Definitely Yorkshire British accent.
My TA is from Bengladesh and I get 30-40% of what he says
Hahaha It’s so true, but I’m talking about native accents. The english speakers from the India region of the world seem to have the most difficult accents to understand…something about how they don’r pronounce all the vowels.
I also had a TA for organic chemistry last year whom I couldn’t understand a word he said. Why do some people speak english fluently on advanced topics… but with an incomprehensible accent?
“Why do some people speak english fluently on advanced topics… but with an incomprehensible accent?”
Hard to answer. I think that accents is probably the only part in language learning where “talent” can come into play, but there definitely are ways to work on it. I’ve heard that recording yourself and comparing it with native speakers can work pretty well.
It makes me crazy because when you speak a “major” language you’re used to hear all kinds of accents and the fact that a ton of people study at such a high level and cannot even speak clearly baffles me.
It would be ridiculous to be frustrated at them because why wouldn’t they take the job? There’s definitely something wrong with the hiring process because this happens all the time.
English insn’t easy, dude!
Listen to these two English-natives to figure out what I’m trying to say. Listen from 38th minute…
Some Scottish people are hard to understand. It’s more so the words/phrases they use that I don’t understand, not really the pronunciation/slurring of words.
The hardest accent I’ve had trouble with has been with people from the mountains of North Carolina. They have a real weird way to talk, almost doesn’t seem English. (I live in North Carolina, only about 2 hours from areas like this, and it’s crazy how drastic the change of accent is)
-I have a Southern US accent myself.