But I mean you guys do get foreign languages at school right? Or can you only chose them later on? Cause we are obligated to learn at least one foreign language at school in order to graduate. Traditionally those were English, German and French. Nowadays the kids can also follow Spanish, Italian, Arabic etc.(it depends on the school what extra languages you can follow).
Maybe it's because I'm from Amsterdamn that I grew up surrounded with all kind of nationalities, or that the dutch tv also shows german, french, italian, spanish, chinese, turkish etc. channels. I even manage to get an almost perfect score on roughly telling where tourists are from by their looks or behaviour
And about the accents, come on english is waaaaaay different than northern american. Agreed that it's sometimes difficult to tell, but australian is way different than scottish etc.etc.
The way canadian talk, they got this strange way of saying words like "out", a bit the Avril Lavigne way
Even the difference between people from northern england(for example the "scouse" accent) and the ones from London(for example "cockney" accent) is worlds apart.
Don't mean to offend anybody by the above stated, cause I know that it is very generalising(???).