When I just began speaking English more or less fluently I had no problem with American English but British just sounded like a different language to me. I had

When I just began speaking English more or less fluently I had no problem with American English but British just sounded like a different language to me. I had to watch any movie with British English with subtitles. Nowadays I have to make an effort to recognize British accent otherwise it sounds no different than American. I imagine different regional accents in Russian could be the same for non-native speakers. What a native speaker does not even notice could be completely unintelligible for somebody with just few hundred hours of studying the language.