According to your interpretation, it would be just as fair to say "it takes a few weeks of practice to be able to understand someone from the US, if you're from the US". I feel justified in not interpreting it that way.

If you're an American to whom general-audience American television doesn't make complete sense, and who misses many of the cultural references, then I'm quite relieved that I have a different interpretation.

I've seen a fair amount of British TV, and I'm fairly comfortable with the idioms and vocabulary differences. Less so than American TV, but I think that's fair, since I'm not immersed in the culture.

I've seen much less Australian TV, but a lot of the slang was utterly unfamiliar to me, in what I have seen. I'm sure that if I watched more, it would become more familiar.

I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

> I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

Nothing. What's controversial is equating "other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences" with "it takes a few weeks of practice to intelligibly [sic] understand someone from another place".

The first of those, yours, is a very weak claim. The second is a very strong one.

I said "this is dramatically overstated" and you're trying to contradict me by saying that a much weaker version of the claim is true. Yes, it is, that's what "overstated" means.

What I'm saying is that you took the strongest possible interpretation and knocked it down as a strawman. If there are several possible interpretations of someone's argument, and one of them is obviously flawed, then it's not very generous (or constructive, IMO) to attack the flawed interpretation.

You speak of the principle of charity [0]. Something that has long vanished on many internet forums, where people are quick to take the most absurd and least likely interpretation of a statement and argue against it. Especially when being pedantic about certain word phrasing or word choices (to which the OP would often respond with "You know what I meant.")

My best friend is Australian, the idioms are often nonsensical or require a bit of thinking due to being a variant of an idiom I'm familiar with. e.g "a roo loose in the top paddock"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity