I'd been getting quite a bit of comments on my English accent recently, but well, it really had been quite complicated. I'm not sure myself where my accent came from now.
Although I'd been from China, people don't identify the Chinglish in me anymore. There was once two ladies asked to guess where I was from before I was introduced, and the first thing they say is "definitely not Chinese".
From my middle school back in China we've been having foreign English teachers for our English speaking. I think the first foreign teacher that influenced my English accent would be Jim when I was like 14. Jim's from the US and the Chinese English textbooks are written in American English so it sort of makes sense. I've also had Australian and New Zealand foreign teachers back then but I don't think that they'd influenced me as much as Jim. I think he was pretty proud of me as his student as I ran into him on the streets of Guangzhou in 2008 (almost 10 years after he left that school, and I was visiting back China from Australia after my first year study in University of Melbourne) and he still recognized me.
The so-called 'Crazy English' frenzy back in the late 90's also influenced me I guess. And the Chinese founder of the method was also promoting American English. What I was asked to do was listen to a cassette tape of famous American speeches such as 'I have a dream' by Martin Luther King and try to speak like they do, then record your own version and listen to them to find the difference.
Before I came to Australia I attended a course in which the majority of subjects were taught by foreign teachers, and most of them English. I don't really know but I didn't seem to pick up too much accent from them. But at the same time I started watching 'Skins', which was played in quite strong a Bristol/Welsh accent, I didn't think I was affected by that that much either.
And there I was hitting Melbourne in early 2007 and without spending a single day in the US in my entire life I was identified with a nasty mix of American and Chinese accent. People did comment on my American accent then and I was quite embarrassed when I was working in the market people misunderstood my 'can't' as 'can'. Through working though, I've learnt how Kiwis have that funny way to pronounce 'thank you', which annoyed me for quite a while.
I think living for a while in a city does changed my accents too, by the time I moved to Adelaide people started to comment on my 'Melbourne accent', I didn't really know what Melbourne accent is at all, and I could tell very little even by now.
My accent seems to have taken an English turn from here. And I think the main influence was YouTube. I'd subscribed to so many youtubers from the UK now. While some of them has a relatively mild British accent such as charlieissocoollike and kickthepj, there are nastier accents by the likes of jimmy0010 and nostrilshorts. And when I start speaking these days I almost say 'say' as 'see' now. I've even got comments that I got 'received' accent, well I guess I did 'receive' a lot of accents...
And here I am.
