I think this is especially true for native speakers of languages derived from latin. Why ? Because in classical latin to pronounce a word you just pronounce every letter in the standard way. So you tend to associate the written word strongly with the way it is spoken. However in the real world languages are spoken first, and the way words are written only follows later (or does not always, which can cause a whole lot of problems, like in French).
Now I don't know about Italian, but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.
Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)
> but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.
That's true but French is kind on an exception among latin languages, it is a phonetically complex language compared to Italian or Spanish.
Yeah. Spanish does have regional phonetic differences, but they don't tend to be hard to understand. Vocabulary is much more likely to cause misunderstanding.
This phonetic simplicity is there in (modern forms of)Indic languages. You can look at, say, a Hindi word you've never seen before and pronounce it if you know how to pronounce the individual letters/joint letters.
> Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)
To be honest, as a native French speaker I find it sometimes very hard to understand the French spoken by people from African countries. The same is true for deep countryside French accents, who tend to pronunciation words with different phonemes. (Such as trilled R's)
Now I don't know about Italian, but a non-native speaker who has learned French as spoken in Paris will more than likely not understand a native French speaker from Québec or Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). So I don't think this problem is specific to English.
Although it is true that if you learn English from the Internet, you'll be very surprised the first time you hear an Englishman :)