An accent isn’t a mistake. It’s a map of every place someone’s voice has lived.

An accent is history you can hear. It carries where someone grew up, who raised them, which language came first, and how many places they have had to make themselves understood in. Treating it as an error means treating a biography as a defect. Anyone speaking your language as their second one is doing something you may not be able to do at all.

Listen for content rather than pronunciation, and give people the extra two seconds if they need them. Never finish the sentence for them. If you miss a word, ask, which is respectful, while pretending is not.