people do get confused with accents, just last summer when we were walking our dogs down at the local beach park, we struck up a conversation with another walker, and the man later asked if I was from South Africa, and have been asked that a few times. Always surprises me that I still have any "accent" left, after being here so long, - But what happened is that I went back to England for about 5 months when I was 19 , and really got an accent back during that time, without realizing it, and guess it never really went.

Funny re "jumper", I'd forgotten that momentarily. Jumper here in North America is what is called "pinafore dress" in England, not sure what they are in NZ.

can relate to that, coming from England as a kid, to Canada. People couldn't understand us either.

Had never heard of "chook" before til my friend Les mentioned it, but he was talking about cooked chickens for a meal : )

You will smile at this, - when my friend came out here from NZ in 86, she lost her passport, so we had to contact the local police, who came to our house to get details from my friend. I had to "interpret" for the police, even tho she spoke English, LOL, as they couldn't understand her accent.

luckily, someone found her passport and it was returned to her shortly after.

Thats funny! Yes, we do refer to chickens as chooks here. I think its kind of a slang term for them. It seems funny that someone doesn't know what a chook is though. I did notice that even though I spoke english, on my trip to Canada, most people didn't have any clue as to what we were saying most of the time :-)