What does an american accent sound like to a foreigner?

[Slimebeast]

Khuutra said:

Slimebeast said:

Khuutra said:

There's a difference between dialects and accents. Most United States citizens speak in dialects that are similar enough to one another that they're hard to tell apart for native speakers, but almost every single region has its own accent that is completely dissimilar to many others.

It matters because getting a standardized dialect or accent is a lot harder with a larger population.

I dont really understand this.

Besides, in Sweden the words are used so that a "dialect" is a regional variant of pronouncing the language, while "accent" only applies to a foreigner pronouncing the language.

Word usage varies very slightly between regions, which means we may use colloquial phrases which don't make sense to people from other regions, but the core of the language is exactly the same so that it comes across as being the same dialect for many people.

In English a "dialect" is referring to a branch of a language that is very different from another branch. For the sake of comparison, try to imagine Mandarin Chinese versus Cantonese Chinese: being able to speak Mandarin doesn't mean you can speak Cantonese, and there are dozens of Chinese dialects.

Accents have to do with intonations and tonal differences that don't really have anything to do with the dialect that one is speaking.

Thanks for explaining. So let's keep it to accents then, because that's how I understood the thread anyway.