Mm. I'm not sure if any accent is really a sign of evil.

I mean, people can hear I'm from out of town nine times out of ten, but I've never actually had people fail to understand what I was saying unless they didn't speak english (or any other language I have on offer)

Given how diversely english is spoken, I could never manage to sound perfectly Australian AND Nigerian AND Irish, simply because the differences are so huge you couldn't possibly manage even two of those at the same time.

I've always preferred to aim for something that is intelligible to anyone who has english as their first language, rather than trying to copy native of any one place.

What I find with many American accents is that I have to build a little translation table to account for its difference, while they don't appear to need any such effort to understand me. It's definitely very slurred and often features moving around of phonemes in ways I was surprised to hear, though not all US-somewhere accents are that bad.

I agree about the hindu one though. It can be pretty dense when they don't make any effort to switch to a mode of speaking less suited to hindi (or whatever else their native lang is -- there's plenty in India) and more suited to english.

What people who learn a second language often (VERY OFTEN!) miss is that the phonemes, those are the specific sounds used, are different from language to language. Every language uses a subset of all possible phonemes, and some languages naturally miss certain phonemes entirely.

What most beginners will do, is use their native phonemes, however poorly those fit, and apply them to the new words. This can create a second language proficiency which is almost entirely useless to communicate with, unless it's in writing, or when talking to others who use a native language with similar phonemes.

Politicians trying to be statesmanly by speaking english can often make this mistake for several hours in public.

This is also why most second language classes demand that you take oral tests, converse with eachother, repeat after taped native language speakers, and preferably hold conversations with native speakers.

If you've never used any but your native phonemes, it takes a lot of practice and conscious effort to develop a new set to go with the new language. It will likely not actually be what the standard native is like, since your mouth, tongue and throat are used to making other noises, and it'll still be audible in all but a rare few cases.

To add to that, english has rather easy grammar, which is wondrously lightweight compared to many other languages, but ... it's not phonetically written. Least not the vowels. The consonants are pretty straightforward (cept for the y, which is kinda like a hybrid in english as in other languages), but the vowels are a total crapshoot.

So if you have had a very cheap and very fast english course before starting in the call center, it's entirely possible that you learned a lot of words the wrong way, and it's hard to unlearn something you've learned wrong before.

Don't let the foreigner thing fool you, it's entirely possible to teach any human being to speak easily understandable english, even very retarded ones, but it takes time to do properly, even for someone who's really gifted with languages. You don't need to be smart as much as you need to memorize a lot of words (around 2000 is enough for almost anything, the other 200k or so are why you want a dictionary) and common phrases (and the meanings thereof!), and practice until it sounds good.