She spoke English quite well.

Not gonna lie. I think she is—to me—one of the prettiest girls I've seen.

As a non-native english speaker, where was the difficult to understand part?

Maybe it's because I speak American, which isn't English, really...
Perhaps that's why I found it hard to understand...

(I think George Bernard Shaw's quote goes something like this; "England and America are two countries separated by the same language")...don't even have the capacity to figure how a Gaelic accent figures in there lol

As a non-native English speaker, what can I do to be middle-aged when I'm 60?

Also, American is real goddamn English. The puritans rescued English from the British when it was still in a salvageable state and brought it to America; after they left it just fell to shit in the Queen's country. I don't think any honest man among us can forgive British English for having rudely chopped "I've gotten" into "I've got." Fuck that noise.

Seconded. The accent helps.

I think accents go both ways. As an American teenage boy visiting Dublin many years ago, I distinctly remember an Irish girl telling me "Ah loove yur achsint!"

I actually got almost all of it (missed 2-3 words to a combination of crowd noise and the accent) without subtitles. But I've got several UK friends and coworkers, English and Irish, plus having English friends of the family that visited often when I was growing up.

A lot of the folks in my small hometown in Kansas are the type that have never been out of the state, and who need the TV subtitles even for accents that seem really easy to me like BBC English, New Zealand, Sydney (not broad Australian), etc. Just hopeless with accents.


But actually, the best thing about the video was her story -- which was actually quite funny assuming I got the "IRA" implication correct.

Talk about 'speaking english, I think', rereading my comment makes it seem like I could be saying 'She isn't hard to understand, you're stupid for saying so', totally not what I meant to say.

I guess it just comes down to having heard those accents more or being around bad english speakers while learning the language.
I jokingly refer anyone mentioning having difficulties understanding spoken english to watch episodes of The Sky At Night with the late Sir Patrick Moore, almost no accent will give you trouble after that and you learn about the universe
example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y60oPFChu1U

It's all good---and thanks for explaining!
And she is cute, isn't she? and the accent doesn't hurt.
And it's a funny damn story (unless you're the old lady whose car she jumps into the back seat of...)

I think she would have survived a drunk Mark Wahlberg.

When I visited Dublin from Connecticut I was talking to this friendly couple in a bar. I was writing down their address to stay in touch with them and the girl was spelling their address and she said "oy". I drew a blank, she kept saying it and I had no idea so I gave her the pen and she wrote the letter "i". We all had a good laugh.

Anyone with a connection to Newfoundland and Labrador, or Cape Breton will recognize that accent straight away b'y

Yes, but was she still cute after you heard her Sean Connery voice?

Sean Connery is Scottish, not Irish

I didn't have too much trouble understanding her, but then I'm an American, living in Australia, with a South African boss