Comment by KAMSPioneer
1 day ago
Just to add here that this guy doesn't have a "standard" Spanish accent. He was from Andalucía (I don't remember where exactly), a region rather known for its accent being difficult for even native speakers to understand.
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
I always thought this was from Mexico!
Spanish native here. Andalusian accent never was known by being difficult to understand. Have other associations, but never that it's difficult to understand.
Some Andalusian accents can be really thick, but so can be the accents from other regions. It also depends where from Spain you are from: I am from Extremadura and usually don't have any trouble understanding even the strongest Andalusian accent, but some of my Basque and Catalonian colleagues find it really difficult, but the opposite is also true.
I'm Basque. It was just difficult the first times, kinda like a hick accent from the US for English speakers (or Irish/Scott). The following listenings were really easy to understand.
For English speakers: North and Castille (middle) Spanish it's like vanilla Spanish. It's understood almost everywhere modulo some jargon. Kinda like English from the BBC or the NBC/NPR/CNN.
Andalusian Spamish it's like Southern English: Fast speech, ommited consonants and merged words and some loanwords from Arabic used in everyday words but for us they are like ancient Spanish (Arabic origin alcancia vs hucha). Kinda like the borrowings from Spanish in the Southern US Engish). Lasso vs lace/ribbon, aficionado vs fan and so on.
West Andalusia, maybe; but the Eastern accents plus Murcia are hard-drunken Irish mode for Spanish.