Heavy Accent Problem for Native Speakers?

[thedaffodils]

Hi! Mandarin is an official language in China. Except for Mandarin, we Chinese have many dialects. Some Chinese people speak in Mandarin with very heavy dialectical accents. Sometimes I even can't understand what they are talking about.

I am wondering whether you native English speakers have the same problem with each other sometimes. And I refer to accent only and exclude slang

For examples, a Yankee can't understand the English of a person from Dixie; An English can't understand the English of a Scottish; An American can't understand the English of a Briton who has very heavy Lancastrian accent.

Thank you!

[Soup]

Accents are accents, meaning that everyone no matter what the accent is will have some difficulty understanding sounds they are not familiar with. Some people are good at "breaking the code", others are not.

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Shanghainese sounds like French-Japanese to me.

[thedaffodils]

Hello Soup,

Thank you for your reply. I see. I remember I once met with an Australian but I couldn't understand him at all except one word I caught, that is "container" which the guy pronounced it as "contarna". I felt very frustrated about my English at that time because I had thought my English listening was very very lousy at that time. But I could understand the English of Americans or Britons basically.

I am not a Shanghainese though I live here. My mother tongue is Southern Fujian dialect, which is same with Taiwanese. Yet, I can't speak it very fluently now. Whenever I speak with my friends, I always subconsciously switch it to Mandarin. I understood very limited Shanghainese if the local people speak very very slowly.

I am not a good decoder.