raoul: You may be less sensitive to French accents since it's your native language. I've seen this play out in the opposite direction as well... English is my wife's second language (Spanish first), but she speaks it without a noticeable accent. When I introduced her to Monty Python, she couldn't follow their language at all. That continued to be a pattern for anything with British accents. She finally learned how to understand those accents by watching movies with the English subtitles turned on. As a native English speaker, various accents on it hardly bother me at all.
I'm probably not a good judge, though, because I remember having an instructor of Chinese descent, and I was the only member of the class who could figure out what he was saying. Mr. Lee... or, as he would say, "Missah Ree." Each morning we'd take a quiz on the previous day's material, and as everyone failed but me, he'd send everyone over to my desk, where I'd deliver a quickie version of the previous day's lecture. The most frequent comments during these lectures were "He said THAT?" and "How the hell do you understand him?"
The most hilariously awful English accent I've ever heard was when I met two women originally from Vietnam who were living in rural Virginia. The pronunciations of Vietnam and the Deep South were mixed together to produce something unrecognizable to either group.
