Do foreign accents sound different in different English speaking countries?

I have a colleague from East Germany who learned French there, then learned English in Canada from Quebecois. His accent is one of a kind.

Yes. I have friends from former British colonies (Kenya and India) who learned British English in school. The one from India in particular sounds very British at times. They also say things like "lift" and "lorry," which always befuddles me for a few moments. (We are in the US.)

Yes, people use the accent that they learned and/or lived with the longest. Most French people in France who learned English in public school speak it with a Queen's English accent and UK vocabulary. French people in France who learned Business English usually speak it with an American accent and vocabulary. As an aside, I learned French from an American teacher who had lived in southeastern France and taught us with tapes that used Provençal (part of the southeast) accents. So I actually have a "natural" Provençal accent when I speak French that gets me mistaken for one here. People from Paris especially get belly laughs when they finally find out I'm American. "L'Américaineuh qui parleuh commeuh uneuh niçoiseuh, heeheehee!" ahem :o) So yes. This is a thing.

Absolutely. I'm a native (American) English speaker. What little German I speak is almost unaccented, for reasons unknown to me. But the even less Spanish I speak has a German accent. Confused the heck out of my Spanish-speaking friends, I tell you what.

Danish footballer Jan Mølby played for Liverpool in the 1980s and 1990s. When he first came to the UK he spoke English perfectly, but with a very strong Danish accent. A few years later, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-MZMeA8EuM.

My best friend (we are Americans) married a man from Norway who had learned British English in school. When I first met him a decade ago, he spoke British English with a fairly heavy Norwegian accent, except when he said "cool" when he sounded like he was in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Now that he's been in the U.S. full-time for a decade, he speaks with a Chicago accent with just the barest hint of foreign origin except when he's very excited (when he sounds more Scandinavian than usual). He still sounds like Keanu Reeves when he says "cool." It was funny because he has a brother a few years younger (whom I met at about the same time), and the school they had attended had consciously switched to teaching American English (as being more useful for students intending to work internationally), so the older brother spoke British English and the younger spoke American English, both with heavy Norwegian accents!

More anecdata: I grew up in Indian learning English from parents who themselves learnt from British English speaking teachers (quite literally Irish nuns in my mom's case). I also spent a couple years in the US between the ages of 7 and 8. I was constantly told that I had an American accent when I returned to India. Over the years it faded somewhat and became more British sounding. When I came to the US for grad school my accent changed yet again, becoming more American sounding. Now when I ask people what my accent sounds like, they can't quite place it. The last American I asked said it sounded mid-Atlantic, which is a mix of English and American sounding accents.

Yes, it's far more specific than you would think. I was an exchange student in Sweden in high school, and I got put into a class of returning exchange students (because most students stay together through high school, this was a sort of adaptive plan for these 20 students who were now a year behind their classes). Most of my classmates had been students in the US or UK, plus one South America and one Australian, and I could absolutely tell. The best one was a girl who'd just done a year in fairly rural Tennessee, and had the hickest American accent I'd ever heard, including my own Texan peers. Pretty much everyone else in school had a pretty standard UK TV + Received Pronunciation accent as taught in Swedish schools, but you could tell who had done summers in various parts of the UK. I took French III the year I was in Sweden, and my French accent was dramatically different from my classmates'. Also, most of the other exchange students in my group in my area were from Canada, New Zealand, NY State, and Australia, and while some of this can be traced back to the socioeconomic class and origin of our host families, we all had different accents in Swedish. Accents are fucking amazing.

As an American I was fascinated to hear Asian immigrants speaking English with Australian accents when I went to Australia the first time. Of course it makes sense that that's the case, I was just very American-centric in how I figured people in other countries learned English. Also, I apparently speak Spanish with a German accent.