ACCENT AND DIALECT

     There are two possibilities here. The first concerns accent and the second concerns DIALECT. You might be having problems understanding someone because the accent is very strange to you; and you might be having further problems for reasons of dialect.'Dialect' involves more than just pronounciation. It involves grammar as well. The person speaking to you may be using words you aren't familiar with: the vocabulary or lexis may be different. So, if the dialect is very strong-and strange to you-you will certainly have a serious problem.
This doesn't mean that a foreign sounding dialect of English is, in fact, a foreign language. It isn't. A dialect is a dialect of a particular language. It's related to a parent language. Some of the rules are different, but they aren't different enough for the dialect to be considered a completely different language. When the difference is purely one of accent-saying "but" to rhyme with "foot" in English, for example-things aren't too difficult. But when the order of words, or the actual words used are also different, then we are dealing with a dialect rather than just an accent.
     We call the study of sounds in a language phonetics, and a special alphabet, called the phonetic alphabet, has been devised. If you've ever seen It-and you can find It used in good dictionaries-you'll see that It looks rather different from the ordinary English alphabet. It's not necessary to learn this alphabets, though it can be learned quite easily.
     The point is that it allows people to write down exactly how a word is said, so that other people who know the phonetic alphabet can say the word.