Many people actually do know where California and Washington DC are, but for the record:
California, my home, occupies the southern half of America's Pacific coastline and extends eastward over a very high mountain range for about 250 miles (400km). Los Angeles and San Francisco are its most famous cities, but we live near much smaller Eureka, which is 300 miles (480km) north of San Francisco and near the top of the state. California has beaches for swimming, mountains for skiing, deserts, forests, farms, and of course Hollywood and Disneyland.
Washington DC (District of Columbia) where I work is around the midpoint of America's Atlantic coastline. It is the nation's capital and therefore is separate from all of the 50 states. It is primarily the place of government and the homes of the people who work for the government, but obviously it has stores, restaurants, bars, and other businesses to serve their needs. It has about 600,000 people and occupies approximately 300 square miles (750sqkm). My second home is actually about 15 miles (25km) north of Washington in the state of Maryland. Millions of people who work in Washington live in the nearby suburbs in Virginia and Maryland.
Maryland and Virginia are in the "Northern" and "Southern" regions of the USA; i.e., they fought on opposite sides during our Civil War in the 1860s, which resulted in the end of slavery when the North won. There is still significant animosity between Northerners and Southerners, and between Americans of European ancestry (colloquially called "white people") and Americans of African ancestry (colloquially called "black people"). In fact, 145 years after the war Afro- and Euro-Americans still maintain separate communities with their own music, social customs, and dialect of English. Since the 1960s there has been a massive effort to integrate us and it has had significant success. Our current President is a symbol of this success: the son of an Afro-American father and a Euro-American mother. Nonetheless integration has a long way to go before it is complete.Please come to the Linguistics subforum where you will find more people who are both able and interested in helping.
To correct this post:
- Please be diligent about using capital letters appropriately. This is very important in English and if you do not capitalize when necessary your writing will always look like a child's.
- Also, be sure to use punctuation marks: period, comma, question mark, etc. Some of our members write poorly but please don't regard them as your teachers.
- Correction:
Thanks, friend. What do you thnk about my English, friends? I think I know a little English, but some of my friends told me, "You cannot speak English." What are some ways to speak better?
- Thanks, friend. Capitalize the first word in every sentence and end every sentence with a period (unless it is a question).
- "Thanks" and "friend" are not closely related in the sentence so you must put a comma between them.
- What do you think about my English, friends? You can't put "friends" in the middle of the sentence at random. Put the name or title of the person or people you're talking to at the beginning or at the end, separated by a comma. There are other ways to do this but they are more complicated. Stick with the easy way for now.
- Remember to capitalize England, English, and all names and adjectives derived from names: Sanskrit, Polynesian, Atlantic, Martian.
- This sentence ends here so close it with a punctuation mark. Since it's a question, use a question mark rather than a period.
- I know a little English but some of my friends told me... The second clause disagrees with the first: your friends don't think you know as much English as you think you do. So you need to use but instead of and.
- Some of my friends told me, "You cannot speak English." You are introducing a direct quotation so you must precede it with a comma, begin it with a capital letter, end it with a period, and enclose it in quotation marks.
- What are some ways to speak better. If you say the ways, you are asking for all of them.
- To speak better, not to I speak better. A verb preceded by to is an infinitive, and an infinitive does not take a subject.
- There is never a space between the last word in a sentence and the period or question mark that ends it. You may find exceptions in technical writing, which contains numbers, URLs, etc., but not in prose.