What do American accents sound like to foreigners?

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there is an east texas and a west texas accent- the western one exaggerate/harden their Rs like californians, while the eastern one tends to soften over their Rs like folk in louisiana/mississippi. and there are different new york city accents among the various boroughs/long island.

Thanks AuntBlabby, I will study these lol

^^^
prego
how much difference is there between east australia speech and west australia speech?

Don't know, never been and all our TV is from the US so we never see them speak.

it sorta seems like that one has to be a long-term resident of a particular country before one can start to discern the various regional accents within that country.

all australians have the same generic accents. there are of course differences in individual people.

the best way i think to show the generic accents of area of australia is to listen to the new readers who all have a generic accent local to the city their news is in

sydney accent (east coast)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxg7wpT0uqw[/youtube]

perth accent (west coast). (the policeman at the beginning is a new zealander andd is not indicative of an australian accent)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTSVREF-jc8[/youtube]


i can tell the difference between certain american accents. southern accents are quite different to northern ones. the new jersey "nu joisey" accent is quite different to the new york accent and the bostonian accent ("gonna gedda cup a cawfy") is different again, even those three areas are so close to each other.

I'm from New Zealand, and my knowledge of US accents is mostly from TV and movies. So basically, my "knowledge" is just a handful of stereotypes. I can think of maybe four different accents that I can distinguish:

(1.) "boring" (newscasters)
(2.) "New York" (Joey from Yu-Gi-Oh!)
(3.) "Southern" (Tommy Lee Jones)
(4.) "black" (Dave Chapelle)

I'm also very bad at distinguishing Canadians from Americans. As far as I can tell, it's sort of like the New Zealand / Australia split, where the two accents overlap at the edges.

I've visited the US twice as a tourist, and both times I noticed something interesting. I could understand everyone perfectly, but quite often Americans couldn't understand me at all. It must be because a New Zealander hears American accents all the time, whereas an American probably doesn't hear New Zealand accents very often. So when I was buying stuff or whatever, I found myself putting on a slight American accent to avoid the hassle of misunderstanding.

thank you for that, it was educational it seems to these american ears that the eastern one was "milder/softer" with more of a stereotypically english sound [as perceived by a typical yank] whereas the western one was more stereotypically [to americans] "aussie" what with the "eye" coloration of the "A" vowel sounds.

All aussies not only sound alike to me- but its hard for me to tell any of them from London Cockney speakers.

B9's youtubes made the difference crystal-clear to me. the easterners sounded more english to me, while the westerners sounded more like what most americans think of as "australian."