[Oreb]

> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.

Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.

[lefra]

As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.

[VorpalWay]

It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).

[pavel_lishin]

My college had a lot of Indian & Pakistani students & instructors, and the first few semesters were rough, but by junior year, their accents were totally understandable to me. It was a very useful experience to have, as someone who became a software developer.

I wonder what they thought of my Russian accent.

[quadrifoliate]

If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.

A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:

- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English

- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").

[mistrial9]

as a native English speaker in California, this is funny to read. I was standing in a crowd of undergraduates at UC Berkeley, shoulder to shoulder, during a break in a movie. Two guys were talking Very Fast right next to me, I mean 0.5 meter in a crowd. I decided to run an experiment because I could not pick out any of what they said. So I turned and spoke slowly in an ever so slight British formal version of California English "excuse me, do you know what time it is?' . One stopped and answered -- almost exactly as I spoke -- the current time (around 18:00). Then they went back to their talk! it was English!