Hehe, Although I think Tsugaru is more different from Standard Japanese than Cajun is from Standard English i.e. I can sorta understand the Cajun people in that video if I listen carefully a few times, though I've been hearing Southern accents my whole life as a result of living in Alabama for nearly 20 years
Though I don't have a southern accent :I but I do say "fixing to" for "about to" (like in "I'm about to leave") which I didn't even know was a southern-only expression til I talked to my northern cousins O:
Man, divergent dialects are scary from a student's point of view but if even native speaker's can't understand it... I wonder if there's textbooks on how to understand Aomori people...
BTW, just out of curiosity; Are accents bad with older Japanese people?
Here in the southern US, often older people (heck, not even that 'old' -- 40-year-old+ people) are nearly impossible to understand. Just tonight, I went to a meeting and there was this guy in his 50's was trying to talk to me and I just got tired of asking him "What?" so I just nodded my head and pretended to understand him :/ This is a sadly common phenomenon, so does this happen with older people in Japan too?