English Accents

As a non-native speaker, the different accents of English makes me hesitate about my listenings skills. Some accents are easy to follow, but some others are just impossible for me to understand. I wonder if native speakers find some accents hard to understand. If so, I'd like to know what are these accents so that I could listen to them and learn more about the English's diversity.

Hi Alex! You are not alone. Many of us who are native/fluent English speakers have trouble understanding many different English accents. Here in the United States, thick regional accents can be very challenging to fully understand without spending time in those regions.

Comedian Trevor Noah once joked about how the Australian accent is so thick that he couldn't tell if Australians were speaking English or Chinese =D