Photo by Alf

I frequently receive emails or comments like:

I just started learning English but it's British English. Will I have trouble communicating with someone from the USA? Can you easily understand British people? What is the difference between American and British English?

It's true that there are lots of dialects (I wrote about my dialect a while back), accents and other variations of English (ex. creoles, such as Jamaican).

But is the variation of English that you learn important?

Read more for my response!