What changes between English accents is mostly the vowels, plus a short list of consonant habits. The grammar is very nearly identical everywhere, which means an accent you struggle with is a set of substitutions rather than a variety you have not studied.
And the accent worth aiming at is the one you already hear most, because that one is training your ear every day whether you decided on it or not. Choosing against your own listening is choosing to fight yourself for years.
Eight facts about which English to aim at
- comprehensibility is the target, not an accent. Most English conversations worldwide happen between two people for whom it is a second language.
- aim for consistency, not for an accent. Mixing British vowels with American r sounds is more distracting than either one done throughout.
- rhotic and non rhotic, meaning whether the r is pronounced after a vowel. This single feature separates most of the major accents.
- Irish and Scottish keep the r, as does most of America and Canada, while England, Australia and New Zealand largely drop it.
- the bath vowel, long in southern England and short in the north and in America, and it is the most commented on difference within Britain.
- the t in water becomes a quick d in America and a glottal stop in much of Britain, and the full t is rarer than any textbook suggests.
- received pronunciation is a minority accent, spoken by a small percentage of Britons, and teaching material overrepresents it enormously.
- General American is the other common teaching model and is equally an abstraction rather than a place.
The short list of things that actually move
Four features do most of the work of making two accents sound different. Whether the r after a vowel is pronounced, so that car either ends in an r or ends in a vowel. What happens to a t between two vowels, so that water has a t, or a glottal stop, or something close to a d. The vowel in bath, which is long in some accents and short in others. And the vowel in lot, which is a rounded sound of its own in some places and close to the vowel in father in others.
Learn those four and most of the distance between the two accents a learner is likely to meet is accounted for. There is a longer tail, and it is genuinely long once you get into regional varieties, but the tail is not what is making a broadcast hard to follow.
Where it stops: choosing one and listening to the other
This is the stall and it is almost universal. A learner decides on one accent, usually because a school or an exam implied it, and then spends every unstructured hour on media in the other. Their ear is being trained by what they consume, their intention is set on something else, and what comes out is a mixture with the consistency of neither.
It persists because nothing marks it as a problem. A mixed accent is perfectly intelligible, nobody comments on it, and the learner's own sense of progress is unaffected. What it costs is small and real: an accent that is internally inconsistent takes a listener slightly longer to settle into, and the effort of aiming at a target you never hear is spent for nothing.
The fix is to choose the one your week already contains, or to change the week. Both are fine. Doing neither is the expensive option.
Several hundred speakers reading the same passage
The International Dialects of English Archive is free, needs no account, and holds recordings of speakers from all over the English-speaking world reading the same set passage and then talking unscripted. Reading the same text is what makes it useful: the words are held constant, so what you hear changing between two speakers is the accent and nothing else.
It replaced the two studio voices on a coursebook recording, which presented one British and one American speaker as though each were a whole country. The limitation is in the method: a set passage is read aloud, and a reading voice is slower and more careful than a talking one, so use the unscripted portion for anything about rhythm.
What it looks like when it goes wrong
The recognisable failure is the mixture: a rhotic r and a British bath vowel in the same sentence, which no native speaker anywhere produces. It costs almost nothing and it is the clearest sign of somebody who chose a target and consumed something else.
The second failure is not about production at all. A learner trained on one accent meets another and concludes the speaker is unclear or careless, when the speaker is doing something entirely regular that the learner has never had to decode. Every accent is somebody's careful speech.
The four features above are all vowel and consonant substitutions, which puts them on the twenty that English hears and most languages do not and on th, r, and the handful that give every learner trouble, both under being understood the first time you say it.
The question worth taking next is the receiving one rather than the producing one. You will spend far more hours understanding accents than imitating any of them, and being able to follow a speaker whose vowels are not the ones you learned is a separate skill with its own practice: real speed, real accents, no subtitles.