The Maple Leaf Rag

Right now, I have ten friend requests that are just sitting there. I don't want to refuse anyone but I insist that people send me a message or make a comment on my profile page before I accept them. I don't think that this is too much to ask, do you?

I used to have more than 600 friends on Englishbaby. People would ask to be my friend and I would blindly say yes. Then it got to be too much, there were just too many people to keep track of. Some members left, some just disappeared and many of those 'friends' knew nothing about me and I knew nothing about them. At that point, I deleted hundreds of people that I didn't know.

Now, I only accept people who send me a message or make a NICE comment on my profile page.  I may have accepted you without either of those things but there may be special circumstances that I can't get into here. Suffice it to say that if you want to be friends with me all you have to do is send a message or make a comment and ask to be friends on my profile page. 

I'm going to write some blogs on oral English and how you can get better at it. It's tough for many of you who have no one to speak to in English. I'll try to help you out in that area. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.  

One of my friends saw a documentary on Canada and thought that we eat seal meat here. I had to gently tell her that very few of us actually eat it but some Canadians actually do eat seal meat. I don't, and no one in the southern part of Canada does but in the far north, the Inuit probably eat it. 

 Canada is a huge country and has many different groups of native Canadians in it. Some of the natives live just like I do while others live 'off the land'. They hunt and trap and eat food that comes from Nature, not from a grocery store. They are healthy and happy, for the most part, just as native people are all over the world. My group of people are the newcomers. We've only been here for a few hundred years. The native peoples have been here for centuries and actually own this country, in reality. We have taken it over but the land is rightfully theirs, not ours.  

In case you didn't know, Canada is the second largest country in the world. Only Russia is larger. China and the United States seem like large countries but Canada is larger. You have to realize that, although we are a large country, we have a very small population, only about 33 million.

Although we speak English here, just like the United States, we speak 'Canadian' English and in some parts of Canada we speak Canadian French. Canadian English means that we pronounce the letter Z as 'zed' not 'zee'. Sometimes we end a sentence with something that sounds like a long 'A'. It's written as 'eh' but in reality it's pronounced like 'Aigh' or 'Ayy', just like a long A. When we spell neighbour, we use the u. In many other words we don't take the shortcut that the Americans do, flavour, harbour, etc. 

As fas as accents go, most of us speak the same way as the American announcers on the  news shows speak. Three or four of the best American announcers are actually Canadian. There are some regional accents, most notably the Newfoundland accent, but certainly not as many as you would find in the United States.

There you go! Some information on the giant land of Canada. If you have questions, post a comment or send me a message. Thanks for reading.