!rant
Communication is IMPORTANT, and the way to approach someone is also IMPORTANT.

I experienced that my colleague is from China, and his English accent is so strong (in the context of not understandable, like the word 'folder' he pronounces it 'foda', and the word 'code' he pronounces it 'korr') that I have to ask him to repeat himself (which sometimes I felt guilty to ask him to repeat for thrice, and I am still not able to understand) or maybe we can do it over text. It is much easier to understand him that way and I can leverage these texts to see a bigger picture of the message.

From this, I realised I need to work more on understanding what he is going to say and what he actually meant.

Any advice for me?

You are unlucky. I also don’t like to talk people with heavy Indian accent. It is impossible to get past that accent.

@aviophile "hello this is rangasamy speaking."

@johnmelodyme sometimes they choose English name like John…

@aviophile oh sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

i remember having something like that in our company.
So we worked with some indian developers and were attending meetings. The problem was their accent, which was so bad, that my colleagues had trouble understanding them, which resulted in a lot of stuff being misunderstood. The solution to that was just seize communication via call/video and only communicate via text channels.

Ended up clearing up the projects structure and slashed bug reports by half.

I know a guy who has accent in text too. writes "ze" instead of "the" consistently

Edit: Took me a couple of seconds to understand him even over text

If voice fails, text is the way to go. It may or may not suck depending on communication discipline.

But if you and your colleague can stand repeating stuff over and over and practicing together, then the pronounciation might get better. Anatomically all healthy humans can make the sounds of all human languages. So theoretically, everyone can get good at pronouncing any language with enough training. But it probably is as hard for a Chinese to pronounce English (no matter which one) properly, as it is for a native speaker of a germanic language (like one of the English dialects) to do the same with Chinese.

Learning Chinese also is an obvious option. And depending on how the US gunboat diplomacy evolves further, it might become mandatory to do so for everyone wanting to do international business anyways...

Text communication is unequivocal, more audit-friendly, and doesn't require you to beat whatever they say in head. It is so much better to avoid playing memorizing puzzles on the job.
Requesting a transcript is not making you guilty - it leverages a written discipline and prevents more people in your circle from making assumptions, including yourself.

(for record) Today I learnt some new words,

The actual word - how it pronounced in China

Flutter - Farttah
Xamarin - submarine
Developer - devalapah
Code - coh
XCode - X-C-Coh
Visual studio - viso studio
GitHub - gi-bub
Android - An-join
AK - ah-ka
Server - surbur
Task - tests

So far these are all I got. Took me weeks to understand.