I'd had quite a bit of experience in my time with different US accents by the time I hit college. In my experience, I generally don't have a problem understandi

I'd had quite a bit of experience in my time with different US accents by the time I hit college. In my experience, I generally don't have a problem understanding anyone I'm listening to from the US. Sometimes they have a hard time understanding me, or don't get the slang or vernacular I'm using. When I first got to college, I was suddenly emerged in hundreds of foreign accents (for an undergrad school of ~1200 students, I think we had at least 180 different nationalities represented). Hardest for me to understand were the mainland east-Asian accents. I think because they natively just don't have some of the same sounds we use in English. For instance, my 1st semester, I had a Chinese native professor for Calculus 2. It took me a good 6-8 weeks to figure out what the hell "arfa" was (possibly adding to the confusing was his hand writing was atrocious). Finally figured out he meant "alpha" after he wrote the symbol slightly different one lecture (normally in his handwriting, "alpha" looked more like "<" than "α"). Anyways, I learned a lot about how to understand and interpret various accents while I was in college as I worked as a door guard in the dorms, so I was forced to interact with a lot of different nationalities than I otherwise would have. It has served me pretty well professionally as I've been able to easily work understand colleagues from other countries pretty easily (although they cannot always understand me). One of my favorite encounters was when I worked at a hedge fund that had several multinational offices, but had an all-hands on-site IT gather in the US. I gravitated towards the Brits, as they were a fun lot and I got along with them great. I could understand them perfectly, but they could hardly understand a word that came out of my mouth. Cracked me up to no end at the time, but I was eventually able to communicate to them once I was able to sloppily fall into their vernacular. May not have been perfect, but I made contact. Certainly helped cross-ocean cooperation and communication.