Okay don't be so negative! I see a lot of prejudice comments against "southern chinese." anyone who singles out the Cantonese should not generalize too much because most regions or towns in China have their own style and pronounciation. There are many southern Chinese whose mandarin is very biaozhun (like my mom's for instance). Nobody is perfect... NOBODY! Putonghua was established as the official language of China to allow better internal communication between different areas and was to be used as a lingua franca. Look! Every language, not just Chinese, has subtle pronounciation nuances amongst the different peoples of a region which gives each region its own distinct character and flair. Just try your best to understand each other. There is not one person in this world can speak their own native language perfectly. People who say that they cannot understand another person's mandarin, in my opinion, is just being arrogant and unwilling to really try to listen to what the other person is saying. It's really NOT that hard (I'm talking about pronounciation not about different dialects now). By the way, "hui 回 (second tone)" and "gui 归 (first tone)" are two different words with similar meanings!

don't mix up Accent with Dialect! Shanghainese is a Dialect! Same as Cantonese (which is such a widely spoken dialect that it has become the unofficial second language of China, HK helped with that too of course). I love the different accents that come from the different dialects! You need to learn to let go of the rigidness of Mandarin and allow people to make "errors". There are no "rules" to abide to, language is a HUGE problem in China coz even when everyone speaks Mandarin, they still don't understand one another! I would advise you to learn the dialect of the city you are in. I've learnt Shanghainese and now understand why they make the "mistakes" they often make in Madarin.

yeah,chinese accent drive me crazy also. i'm a chinese native speaker. but I come from north china.now i'm in shanghai, when shanghai people speak shanghai hua, i can't understand one single word! so i think it is not big problem to you. if you dont understand what they are talking about, you can ask them to repeat.

You know what? It's not even a problem for "foreign" people. Last month, I went back to Shanghai, which is my hometown. I was quite used to speaking Pu Tong Hua with other Chinese students in Canada since we were from different parts of China, so I sort of pushed myself to speak it in the standard tone. But when I spoke Pu Tong Hua with the taxi drivers in Shanghai out of custom, they couldn't even understand it, telling me I spoke Mandarin "too correctly"... So really, while you're not very familiar with the accent of the area you're in, you don't have to understand every word people say -- you just have to guess what they mean approximately. Gradually you'll be able to understand, or ignore, the accents just fine. Best wishes for you!

In fact,accent exists everywhere in China.Some of the accents are similar to putonghua.But most of them are totally different from putonghua.When people speak putonghua ,they may make some mistakes because of their accents.They fail to adjust their pronounciation .It is mistake! Surely you'll be driven crazy because the number of accents is countless.An accent changes gradually from one area to another.