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Coincidently my father, who is from Kagoshima, just recently was asked to act as a dialect coach for a Japanese actor working in a short film. My mother is from Tokyo so I don't often hear my dad speak Kagoshima-ben, and because they live in Los Angeles (where I was born), it's mainly standard Japanese I hear him speak. His Kagoshima-ben apparently is very good because he often talked to old people when he was a young child, so he remembers vocabulary that even his Kagoshima friends and family have forgotten.
I remember once, we led a tour of Japanese WWII survivors to Kyuushu, during our visit to Kagoshima I was hanging out with some of the local newspaper men covering our tour, and I decided to try out some of weirder Kagoshima-ben words that I knew from my dad, and they told me that was wrong. I got my father and they still wouldn't believe him, but then he asked one of the Japanese WWII veterans in our group, an 88 year-old man, born and raised in Kagoshima, and he verified what my father had said. It was pretty funny.
During another visit to Kagoshima, I met an American, former Ivy league educated stock broker, living in one of the coastal fishing islands off of Kagoshima, and he told me how weird he thought Kagoshima was initially. He said the comediens on Japanese TV, for comic effect, would use Kagoshima-ben but not that he had learned it, those TV shows weren't funny to him anymore.
As for the tone of Kagoshima, my dad sometimes if overhears a Korean conversation, sometimes for a split-second, he'll think it could be Kagoshima-ben.
I don't think you'll have to worry. I go to Kagoshima often, my standard Japanese is atrocious and everyone is super-nice to me. Sadly, I think a lot of the dialects across Japan are slowly dying out.
My dad was asked to give a speech to elementary school students in Kagoshima recently. He started out the speech in Kagoshima-ben, but a teacher quickly asked him to switch to standard Japanese. She told him that the young children may not understand him.
Here's an interesting fact. Kagoshima-ben was used as one of the methods in World War II to transmit secret messages. Like how the US used the Navajo American Indian language to communicate secretly during the war, Japan did the same with Kagoshima-ben. Unfortunately for the Japanese military, while there were no Navajo speaker in Japan, there were Kagoshima speakers in the US, so the US military would eventually learn how to ''crack'' the radio transmissions of the Japanese military.
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