Blow on/at it!

[ghoul]

There are some native speakers who are terrible teachers with a terrible understanding of English, and then there are some non-native speakers who are outstanding teachers with an outstanding awareness of English.

Perhaps I should have less prejudice then.

I'm a professional teacher who gets paid to teach this kind of thing. Furthermore, I've spent much of the last fifteen years studying the meanings of prepositions.
[...]
Do I really need to 'argue' this?

Those are convincing points. On the other hand, I've had a few situations where even teachers in this forum stated some supposed facts but then there was actually more to it, so I just have(?) a somewhat untrusting attitude, as always. Besides, I caught out other professionals saying wrong things before as well, so profession doesn't necessarily mean high competence to me.
That's not to say your input isn't valuable to me, hence I said that I accepted your answer.

Think about when you wave at someone, or when you smile at someone, or shout at someone. In these cases, you are waving, smiling, and shouting in their direction. This sense of directionality is just one of the several senses that 'at' has.

I'll say it again. If you blow on something, it means that your breath makes contact with the target object. If you want to blow it away (so that it moves out of the picture) you obviously have to make contact. Now, if you use 'at', it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't make contact, but just that you're performing the blowing action in the object's direction.

Is that clear?

Got it.

You'd do better just to listen to our answers. You don't have to try and sound smart.

I'll try to be more conscious about this.

I do feel confident that I understand what you mean, yes. You're suggesting, probably sarcastically, that if you blow on the problem, it will blow the problem away.

Yes.

As I said before, don't translate. Translating prepositions between German and English sometimes works but not often enough to be reliable. It can even hinder learning if you rely on it too much.

Noted.

What does it matter whether you like it or not? What does 'liking it' even mean?

It's hard to describe. I'm looking for ways to make what I say sound more interesting. So I'm trying to choose words based on whether eg they fit the theme(?) I'm trying to portray, in this case cutesy. And I'm sometimes also very particular about my words having a certain sound to them and having certain syllable counts at certain sections of a sentence.
Regarding your suggested sentence, there wasn't anything inherently wrong with it, obviously. I feel like it even fit the theme but I liked a sentence with 2 more syllables at the end more in that situation.

 

[Skrej]

I think we can best illustrate the base question here very well via Monty Python:

I fart in your general direction.

The absurdity of the insult illustrates the point in case about blowing at things. We know you can't actually fart on me unless I'm quite close, but we still recoil.

Too many close calls with pinkeye in grade school for it not to be taken as a legitimate threat.

 

[5jj]

I've had a few situations where even teachers in this forum stated some supposed facts but then there was actually more to it,

Could you give us links to some examples of this, please?

I caught out other professionals saying wrong things before as well

Links, please..

profession doesn't necessarily mean high competence to me.

So what does? @jutfrank is a native speaker of English with many years' experience of teaching, teacher training and examining. In his ten years of helping learners at UE, his 20,000+ posts have received nearly 46,000 thanks/likes.

When you have been here a little longer than you have been a member so far, you will realise that the (experienced/qualified) members of this forum do not always agree. That's because this is a forum, a place for discussion, not a place for laying down prescriptive rules.

 

[ghoul]

Links, please..

Don't worry, I wasn't referring to forum members (with[?]/when I was talking about) catching out professionals. (Please react with a like if both variants inside the brackets are usable.)

Could you give us links to some examples of this, please?

In that thread, my phrase "me and my native learning partner" got corrected to "my native learning partner and I", but the corrector didn't give the context that that was for formal English and only after I asked, someone, coincidentally you, put it into perspective.
To be fair, it was explained to me that this forum teaches standard English; on the other hand, it's important for me to get (clarification/clarified(?)) on if a phrase is completely false or simply informal, because else I may have doubted my memory in that case.
I couldn't think of another example, on the quick.

So what does? @jutfrank is a native speaker of English with many years' experience of teaching, teacher training and examining. In his ten years of helping learners at UE, his 20,000+ posts have received nearly 46,000 thanks/likes.

When you have been here a little longer than you have been a member so far, you will realise that the (experienced/qualified) members of this forum do not always agree. That's because this is a forum, a place for discussion, not a place for laying down prescriptive rules.

Point taken; I agree with the things you mentioned being an indicator of high competence and I also acknowledge that the disagreements between those members are not a sign of lack thereof. To make this clear, I don't mean to claim the professionals in this forum lack competence in their field of expertise. I just want to maintain my usual hint of doubt, for the time being.

 

[jutfrank]

In that thread, my phrase "me and my native learning partner" got corrected to "my native learning partner and I", but the corrector didn't give the context that that was for formal English and only after I asked, someone, coincidentally you, put it into perspective.

emsr2d2 rightly told you that what you said is grammatically incorrect, not informal. Later, 5jj told you why it is incorrect—because you can't use 'me' as subject of a verb.

To be fair, it was explained to me that this forum teaches standard English; on the other hand, it's important for me to get (clarification/clarified(?)) on if a phrase is completely false or simply informal, because else I may have doubted my memory in that case.

There's a difference between ungrammatical and informal. We know you're largely interested in using casual, informal speech, so we won't tend to 'correct' that, but we will correct any errors.

Remember also that in English, as with any language, there is nearly always 'more to it'. We can't be expected to explain everything there is to know in a single post.