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"Wot's da jackinory wit ya mate?"
Didn't take me night classes and linguist specialists to learn that that meant "Hey, what's going on?"
Not only that, I NEVER used idiomatic phrases like that (they just sounded too strange in an American accent), yet, even without the educational benefit of putting them into practice, I was still more than capable of translating them. I was exposed to them, and had the desire to understand, so the rest just happened naturally.
There are other, minute speech differences in this US/UK example - I found myself saying "as well" rather than "too," and structuring inquisitions differently. For example, while an American would more typically say
"You didn't go out Friday night?"
in Ireland/the UK they'd be more likely to say
"Did you not go out Friday night?"
Americans tend to use contractions much more than the Irish.
I personally think tiny nuances like that are much harder to adopt, as they're very slight variations on the way you 'fundamentally' construct your sentences, and therefore much more easily overlooked.
So if that can be done, there's no goddamn reason in the world why you can't change "Gimme my props yo" to "Lend me some credit" in a school paper.
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