[dgunay]

I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.

I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.

I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.