I was once in a conference with Swedish clients with my British colleague from Liverpool. The Swedes understand English very well. However, when my British co-worker left the room, on of the Swedes leaned over to me and asked "Is he really speaking English?". You're not the only one with the problem. Not to say the British accent is wrong - just some local accents are hard for even Americans to understand.

Yes, even native English speakers can confuse each other. ;) The first recommendation is listen widely - don't worry about understanding what's being said yet, just train your ears to recognise the sound, melody, rhythm of the accents. Hear the differences between Scottish brogue and Cockney banter, for example. One suggestion I give students is: listen for the 'iambic' rhythm (d' dah d' dah d' dah...) as speech will drop into this pattern. Not perfectly of course, but often close. Setting up this pattern creates a fluency and ease of speaking. The words that are stressed in the spoken sentence are the subject, the verb and the negative (if there's one). All the important bits! Particles, prefixes, suffixes, etc get the weak stress. This is all on top of the iambic rhythm. The tricky bit with the British style (and related styles like Irish, Australian etc) is our love of wordplay, which can lead to a witty and multi-layered way of speaking. Puns, jokes, alliteration, rhyme are used often in speech, along with idioms and slang. Because it is fun. :) Which leads me to add: don't analyse it too much. Just go with the flow. These aren't fixed rules of course, and American English sometimes uses the same devices. But it seems the British style uses them more often.

i being a canadian find it hard to understand british people aswell, though i am pretty good at immitating accents, my family is part french and so i can do a good french accent as well as understand a frenchmen speaking english really well. i can also do the following accents : british, australian, irish, scottish, middle eastern (it is hilarious when i do a middle eastern one hahahahahahahaha)...

Hi Anthea ... It is the same story with other languages... According to some experts accent is something you can't get rid of and difficult to imitate... only few people are able to do it like actors but it is a part of their talent...

Once upon a time, I've asked the Scottish guy after a second hour of a text conversation:"Is your English perfect?".He said:"I don't know English quite well,can't understand the Londoner(cockney) and so on.."It was no joke. I think even in the UK a matter of accent/dialect is a serious problem for the different regions.At least I've got a such opinion.