Tag Archives: native to America

01 Mar

The second anniversary of LEfF

Terry Lee

Hello, my friends! How have you been? I am excited to announce that today is the second anniversary of LEfF (Learning English from Friends). This is my 277th post. Time does fly, don’t you think?

Over the past two years, I have done my best to share my experiences learning new expressions. Most of the expressions that I have written here are the ones that would not be taught in English as a Second Language class but still used by many American people. I really hope my blog has been a helpful resource for all of non-native English speakers out there.

 

Let me start with talking about top five most popular posts.

1. black sheep

2. I really appreciate it

3. native American vs native to America

4. bun in the oven

5. what is your brownie point?

I would like to congratulate all of the friends who taught these top five posts (Brian, Jeff, Andrew, Jean, Alex, Sangeetha and Ari). Speaking of these five, I just realized that my sister-in-law has a bun in the oven. It’s been five months. Let me take a moment to congratulate her and her husband!

LEfF has gotten about 85,000 page views (3,541 per month and 117 per day) in two years and they are from 170 countries. That means LEfF got attractions from almost 90% of the earth. That is amazing, isn’t it? Here are some of the country names that I have never heard of : Djibouti, Guernsey, Martinique,… The list goes on and on.

How about top five countries? Here is the list.

1. United States

2. United Kingdom

3. South Korea

4. Canada

5. Japan

Hey, I have another interesting statistic. Do you know what is the number one browser people have used to get to LEfF? It is not Internet Explorer. It is Firefox. Thank God! Please stop using Internet Explorer. It is horrible. Chrome is the third browser but not far behind IE. You can use Chrome. 🙂 In fact, it is my default browser and I like it a lot.

What else? Oh.. it shows that readers use 105 different languages. My analysis is that people do want to learn new English expressions online.

Thank you all for your visits and support! Because of you, I am so happy to come back to my desk to write new interesting expressions. Don’t worry! It will keep updated. There are so many out there that I still do not know or have never heard of. It is like going down the rabbit hole every day.

Please share new posts with your friends so that many people get to have a chance to learn new ones.

See you soon!

 

03 Aug

native American vs native to America

Who taught: Jeff

Native Americans (source: http://www.the-wild-west.co.uk/)

I am a native Korean. How does this sound to you? It sounds OK, right?

A few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with my students and Jeff, my colleague. We were talking about last year’s event that all of us were in. And, one of the people we saw there was not American or born in the U.S. Meaning that, I said, “He was not a native American.” Jeff and my students knew what I meant but, at the same time, Jeff knew something might be confusing. So, he said, “I do not think you mean he is not a native American Indian, right?”

This made me think. So, I can easily say that someone is American but there are also many people who are Americans but not born in the United States. When I think of ‘native American,’ I think of the people who are American and also born in the United States. But apparently, there are the real real native Americans who are American Indians. (This is also kind of confusing. You would not want say just Indians because there are other Indians who are from India.)

So, to make things clear, you should say he or she is native to America to mean Americans who are born in the U.S.

Remember! There are differences between native Americans and native to America and Americans. (Native Americans vs native to America vs Americans)

I can become an American later but never be able to become a native American or native to America.

Hope I do not make things more confusing!