That's not even an American thing. I live in the southwest and aside from comedy, thankfully I've never actually met a single person who pronounces nuclear like that. I'd imagine you'd have to pretty much have a disdain for science to pronounce it "nucular". That, or you have a drawl so bad that your drawl has a drawl. I think I'd much prefer to steer clear of either of those sorts, personally. >_>

To be honest, the only person I've head say nucular is George Bush.

How about Homer Simpson and Jack Bauer?

Being honest, I even have issues watching Doctor Who sometimes. Before the first episode featuring the Ninth Doctor, I had never heard the phrase "mucking about".

Even within different subcultures in America, lots of people have issues interacting.

Hell, sometimes even correctly spoken English needs a translation. There are some very, very "southern" people that sound incredibly difficult to understand, like some guy who sounded like he was saying "burr earl", when in fact, he was saying "bar oil".

Okay, George Bush and fictional characters (one of which is supposed to be kind of stupid).

Don't forget, it's spelled "potatoe".

i blame hollyweird. The American movie and music industries were massively exported, and generally well received across the world. Perhaps this help set-up circumstance for broader acceptance of the language. Course there is much more. But i do wonder that the movies and music of olde, helped to bring the American culture and language to people who otherwise would have had no use for it. The science and tech is all well and good for those in the fields, but i think it might'a been the music and the movies that most folk were exposed to.

Here are some more examples from Wikipedia:

U.S. presidents who have used this pronunciation include Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Others who have used this pronunciation include Vice Presidents Walter Mondale and Dick Cheney, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Star Trek actor DeForest Kelley, actor Kiefer Sutherland in his role as Jack Bauer in the TV series 24, and Professor Marcus du Sautoy in a 2011 BBC documentary called "Faster Than The Speed Of Light".

Edit: Marcus du Sautoy is English, so I guess that answers my question.

Wow, there's really a Wikipedia article for everything.

This makes me curious. I see that for the Japan release of the first film, it has the UK title. But in of the later films (no idea which) there's a point where one of the characters says "Happy Christmas", but who in their right mind would say that in British English?

I have never heard the phrase "to go spare", and I wouldn't expect any other American to have heard it either :\

It's ...Merry Christmas...Happy New Year.

I don't get this either.

Do Americans really need to read about pavements instead of sidewalks, to they need to see colors instead of colours?

The most amusing thing are the websites giving you the choice if you want to read them in AmE or BrE and I never could find any differences :P

I know that there are hundreds of smaller and bigger differences, but I believe all Americans will understand BrE easily without any "translations".

There are more differences between southern Polish (especially in Slask :D) and northern Polish than between AmE and BrE.

The differences in pronaunciation are huge though.This. One of the reasons for reading books is to get smarter. If I don't understand some phrase, I type it in dictionary or google to find out what it means. And after that, I'm just a little bit smarter :P

Some of the older works require translation, though. Shakespeare in original wouldn't be understood by most readers nowadays.

Americans use both sidewalk and pavement.

In plays, Shakespeare is never modified (at least not the language itself, passages/plot lines are deleted from different versions for time and/or interpretation). While it can be difficult for modern audiences to pick it up, a good actor/director can really put the words in context and make the language comprehensible. Also if you listen to it long enough it begins to make sense (like anything) without too much effort - although even then there are passages during plays where it can get quite tricky with all the idioms and the words Shakespeare just decided to make up himself - yet another aside, of course we still use some of those Shakespeare-created/modified words today. Most texts for school when teaching Shakespeare usually come with line notes to provide quick explanations of the idioms and/or the historical reference behind a turn of phrase that would've been common knowledge in Shakespeare's age, but they don't touch the language.

However, Chaucer is hard without a translation - at least for me. His language really is archaic and many books come with a side-by-side translations (original text on the left page and new text on the right). I could sort of read the original, but eventually I found myself reading the translated text more than the original. It's kind of an interesting experience.

As for modern British English versus American English, Harry Potter is translated - I have the British version of some books and the American version of others. Things were changed like 'Mum' to 'Mom" and so forth. Kind of silly, I agree - I prefer the British versions (the British versions also had nicer covers in general). Some idiom-heavy British movies do get played with subtitles (especially the crime dramas and especially if they feature Scots or certain heavy English accents). Some movies will actually incorporate a British English to American English dictionary in the beginning often to provide additional comedy for both British and American audiences (and an explanation for the latter - especially if the movie is not a comedy). Let's just be glad they've generally stopped dubbing British english into American English (yes they did do that a lot in the past and yes it was awful).

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For fun:

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/british-movie/1291796

(it seems they took the youtube video of the above down)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfR49AuUsW0