What a difficult accent!!!

If I had a euro for every time someone has said "What a difficult accent!" following a listening activity in class, I would probably be quite well off nowadays. 

Many people ask me, where's he/she from? Why is it so difficult to understand them and so easy to understand you? Good question.... It's true that listening to as many different accents as possible helps to broaden our understanding but perhaps you haven't necessarily got time or you need to get straight to the point, in that case I would advise you to try to receive as much input as possible in your target accent. Your target accent would be, for example, the accent that you will or are being exposed to the most. So if your customers or suppliers are mainly in the UK it's best to use British Council resources or if they're from the USA, try Vaughan systems. 

Another good resource I have come across is IDEA:-
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/
Here you will find a collection of audio extracts separated by people's origin/accent.


Try listening to one of the extracts and writing a brief summary of what you've heard in the comments below!