You have an accent. You talk funny. It is hard to understand what you are saying. You're not from around here.

In real life, an accent is something the listener hears, not something the speaker consciously says. To the speaker, he sounds normal. It's just the way he talks.

A slight accent will go a long way. The thicker the accent, the harder it is to understand what the person is saying. Think "Inspector Clouseau":

With an accent is not how people speak, it is what you hear. So if you are from the West Coast, someone from Georgia will be speaking with a Southern accent (to you, not to her). Likewise someone coming from another country will often speak English with an accent derived from pronunciation of his native language. Studies have shown that it is very difficult to hear differences in another language unless your own language makes those sound distinctions.

The ability to speak English with a foreign accent takes a lot of practice, and if you do a bad job of it (exaggerating is the main reason), it will affect the entire audiobook presentation. You may be far better off to forego trying to sound like Hercule Poirot (Belgian accent) unless you can do it consistently. Another reason to be cautious about accents is that you inadvertently use verbal stereotypes, and risk being offensive.

With the availability of the internet, you can easily find audio presentations of the news in English coming from other countries. If you find an English language news presentation coming from Japan, for example, you may be able to hear grammatically correct English spoken with a Japanese accent (depending on who was hired to read the news). If you record some samples, you can practice by recording yourself too, to hear how close you are to the foreign accent.

ADD HERE: website links

Also, there are books written for actors that can help you create certain accents for English (Irish, British, American, Australian, Indian). For some people, seeing the pronunciation of the words written out for them is the only way to get the hang of it.