The Maple Leaf Rag

When I first started here at Englishbaby, I was helping some people in the Middle East. They needed assistance with their English while they studied at a university in Abu Dhabi. As time went by, I met more and more people from China. This is natural, of course, since China has the largest population plus it's in the middle of rapid expansion in terms of economics. 

A couple of years ago I downloaded QQ, the Chinese chat application, and fell in love with it! There are so many things you can do with it that are different from MSN and Yahoo. I filled my friend's list with people from Ebaby and had many conversations over the years.

Lately, QQ has been quite quiet for me. I had over a hundred contacts at one point and my blogs and Qzone photos were quite popular among my friends but that died off. I'm not sure why that happened but I have an idea.

Initially, I thought that chatting would help my friends learn English but I think that it became a burden for them. Most of the people I knew on QQ were students or were in university and worked very hard during their day, some worked six days a week for long hours. I think that when they finally got home, they wanted to relax and not think too hard about anything. Chatting with me on QQ probably seemed like too much work!

What is the answer? Well, I still have QQ but I've turned it off. I'm invisible on it now and I'll stay that way for a while. I'm not sure how long this will be but it's that way now. I wrote about this in my blog in my Qzone and got some very nice responses from some friends. Some of those friends were not even regular chat partners and I was surprised at their concern.

I'm always willing to help people here on Englishbaby. To be honest, I would rather help females, but that's because I relate to females better than I relate to males. I'm married with three children so I'm not looking for dates or anything but I just seem to be able to chat with girls much better than I chat with boys.

If you have QQ and you think you want to chat sometime, add me. Send me a message on QQ and I might be able to assist you. My number there is

940444293

Thanks for reading! Comments are welcome.  

I'm not sure if people read my old blogs or if they just read the new ones that you see on my profile page. Quite a while ago, I wrote about the words 'fun' and 'funny', explaining how and when to use them. This week, in different chats with different people, I saw them being used in the wrong way. Here's how you use them. 

1.  Fun is a noun, I guess. It's something so it's a noun. You can have it, you can make it and you can enjoy it but you can't see it. If something is fun, it's enjoyable. Different things are fun for different people. Some people can have fun doing the same thing but for different reasons. Is learning English fun? Most people might say no but others would say yes. Here are some fun things for me: games, computers, videos, movies, girls, books, cameras, collecting antiques and so on. What is fun for you? Missing school? A new friend? Going home for Spring Festival? Let me know. 

2. Funny is usually an adjective. In order for something to be funny, it has to make you laugh. Some things are both fun and funny. Watching a clown is fun because they make you laugh, they are funny. Therefore a clown might be both fun (enjoyable) and funny (he makes you laugh). Funny can also mean 'different'. He's kind of a funny guy, he is quite different. Until you know what the speaker means, you could imagine that the person he is describing makes people laugh. Maybe the speaker means that the person is unusual. You'd have to ask him, funny haha or funny weird? That sounds like a silly thing to say be, believe me, we say it quite often. 

Funny can also be strange as in, I heard a funny noise coming from downstairs. That could mean scary or unusual but overall it means the noise is a strange noise.

So fun is a thing that you can have while funny describes something that makes you laugh, or is strange or unusual.

I hope this helps you a bit. Let me know what is fun for you and what kind of things you find funny. Practice it with your fellow students or colleagues.

Thanks for reading! 

My friend Joni made a comment about idioms a while ago. Every language has idioms, things that mean something more than the words that are used in them. English has hundreds of idioms and some are very localized. We have idioms here in Canada that aren't used in the United States. Britain has idioms that are only used there. 

Do you have to learn them? Not really, certainly not to communicate. If you move to an English speaking country, you would learn the idioms as you learn the local geography or customs. They make your conversations more interesting and, because many are humorous, they make you seem to be fun and more like the local people.

If you watch the television show NCIS, you will hear Zeeva make mistakes with the idioms that she tries to use. This is part of the humour of the show and she tries hard to fit in but doesn't always get the words quite right. The important thing is that she tries, and that's the lesson here. Don't be afraid of speaking English. Use it as often as you can. Even when you are in your dorm room with your roommates, use English with each other. Correct each other and see who can use it the best. If you only use English in your English class, you are missing out on a lot of practice. 

Why not have an English day at your university? Have all of the signs for it in English, make sure that everyone uses English on that day and have English movies, games and activities. Have an idiom contest where students guess what the idiom means.

Learning English doesn't have to be boring. Make a game of it, challenge each other and have some fun!

Thanks for reading. See you next time!