Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.
In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to be able to speak at least one foreign language or two, if you don't want to focus on sciences.
> Getting used to and understanding different accents is actually fairly easy, if you watch US and UK tv series regularly.
In TV series UK people tend to talk BBC-alike English, in my experience this is not what is always talked in the streets in UK... so I'll get better understanding tv series but maybe my understanding of street language may not improve a lot.
Btw TV series definitely help a lot in general, and I used to do that, the only problem is that it is a time consuming task.
In one case a documentary serious about Scottish fishermen had to be subtitled because the accents/dialect were incomprehensible to general viewers in the UK:
What I find amusing is that as someone from the area in question it appears that most of the people being filmed are trying hard to talk "properly" - their real accents would be much thicker.
There's a similar show in the US about people in the deep south making moonshine, and I, a US born English speaker could not understand a word they were saying, even with the subtitles I had trouble understanding what word was what.
I remember being surprised at people in Iceland using really American idioms. At one point I asked someone where he learned a particular idiom, he told me he was obsessed with the show "Friends".
In any case this post shows perfectly how important it is to learn languages early on. In Germany you start learning English in 3rd grade and even before school there are kindergartens in which multiple languages are spoken. If you go to a Gymnasium and want to graduate with the abitur you need to be able to speak at least one foreign language or two, if you don't want to focus on sciences.