True this. In the 1990s I visited California and I had to walk out of a sandwich shop because I could not make out a single word the kid behind the counter was saying (Brit with a BBC English accent). There's not one American accent, there are dozens of them, and some of them are very challenging for me. To be fair though, part of that could be influence and merging with other languages brought in my immigrant communities from Europe over the last few hundred years.