[zz865]

Nearly everyone on my team is ESL: Russian, Korean, Chinese, German. Meetings can be a nightmare as everything gets repeated a few times. The Indian guys usually have the best English as they learn from young but accent can be strong. Congrats on working on it no one else seems to try:) .

[colechristensen]

One thing I have noticed is that ESL speakers even from very different languages seem to have an easier time understanding each other than I do as a native speaker. As someone with mild attention issues the frustration is real, especially in the kind of long half-important meeting in which it is sometimes quite important to follow along but other times completely unnecessary.

[majewsky]

ESL speaker from Germany here. My experience is that I can cope really well with the accents that I understand, but I struggle really hard with new accents until I crack their code, so to say.

For example, the wife of a friend is from Turkey and is not very proficient in German, so we talk in English. The first few times it was really tough for me to understand anything, until I figured out how the Turkish accent works. For example, the Turkish accent replaces th -> t, e.g. "tank you" instead of "thank you", which was really confusing for me since I'm used to German ESL speakers who replace th -> s instead.