[joham]

One of my dictionaries compiled by some of China's professors of English says 'nearly' mustn't be used before 'any'. But I searched the BNC, CAE and Time CAE, and found a lot of sentences with 'nearly any'. So could we say 'nearly any' is as good as 'almost any'? And could we say 'nearly like...'?


These sentences come from CAE:
Green is so common before our eyes in nearly any garden that we almost forget it exists.
The coach says it's nearly like snow.

Could I ask native English teachers to help me please? Thank you very much.