Do Britons feel uncomfortable listening to Americans speak, or vice versa?

[Li JQ]

I know that there are many differences between American English and British English, and their pronunciation of the same word can be different. So do Britons feel uncomfortable listening to Americans speak, or vice versa?

 

[emsr2d2]

I don't think "uncomfortable" is the word you're looking for. However, I'm not quite sure what you do mean. Can you try some other words for how you think we might feel?

 

[5jj]

Note that we British people rarely refer to ourselves as Britons.

 

[Li JQ]

I don't think "uncomfortable" is the word you're looking for. However, I'm not quite sure what you do mean. Can you try some other words for how you think we might feel?

I mean strange or confusing

 

[emsr2d2]

I mean strange or confusing.

Don't forget to put a full stop (or the relevant closing punctuation mark) at the end of a sentence.

Speaking as a Brit, no, we don't find it strange or confusing. A hundred years ago, people might have had that reaction to the accent of someone from thousands of miles away but it's the 21st century. We have access to international media so we hear American accents all the time. There are some words that are completely different in American English but most Brits are aware of them and know the British English equivalent. Of course, there are people who speak with a very strong regional accent who might be hard to understand but that's the same in every country. You'll find Brits who really struggle to understand someone with a strong Glasgow accent as much as they do someone with a strong, say, Texan accent!

 

[Skrej]

As an AmE speaker, I can say there are only a few very strong regional BrE accents that cause any confusion. The vast majority of BrE accents give us little if any pause. Occasionally there are a few minor vocabulary differences that cause a moment's confusion until you can work out the meaning, but those are pretty rare. Particularly with so much modern-day exposure of international media, many of the common differences are well-known enough to not even register any more.

Of course there are noticble differences, especially with vowels and syllable stress, but I wouldn't classify those as 'strange'.

I worked with a guy from I belive it was Birmingham once, (might have been Yorkshire) and I did have a fair amount of difficulty understanding him. Not sure if it was the accent or just his manner of speaking, but he always spoke like he had a mouth full of pebbles. I spent much of our conversations trying to work out where one word stopped and another started.

I did happened to overhear some other BrE colleagues mocking (rather cruelly) his speech, so apparently it wasn't just my AmE ear that had problems understanding him.

 

[Edward B]

Brits don't generally feel uncomfortable or confused when it comes to US versions of English.
American films (movies) have taken away the mystique.

However, the OP is under a common misunderstanding- There are no such things as American and British English, but there are Englishes from both countries.
If you want to see a face distorted by pure discombobulation, watch a man from Stevenage trying to understand someone with a strong Barnsley accent.