5jj and Barb, sorry for the inconveniences I've caused. I know my English is far from qualifying me to help anyone who needs a reliable response from native English speakers like you. In fact, I appreciate that because I'm also the one who hate incorrect and misleading answers. Your excellent work is the very reason that this forum has been running for decades helping a multitude of students and learners from all over the world.
Reliability is one major principle I am trying to follow in my work as a translator, and I was trying to follow it even in here by consulting dictionaries and Google before I responded to a post. But alas, how often I go off the track, I have no idea! I have been learning English for ten years now, but still there is so much I don't know, so much I've got to learn, that I just feel like a beginner at times. I understand learning is not something you can achieve behind a closed door. You've got to surround yourself with like-minded people who are zealous English learners, with someone who can guide you, with friends who want to help you and vice versa. That's how I experienced years ago in a Chinese English-learning forum before it was shut down in 2005. I learned English very fast back then. That's why I decided to come here and join you all after several years of learning it alone. It was not so much learning as grabbing at something so vague and useless and elusive that all I could do was read, read, read. Visiting this forum is a nice change, meeting you all and asking questions and learning things that I cannot really learn by reading news, magazines, novels. More importantly, using what I've learned in ways that I think are helpful to others.
As you are probably aware by now, I do not learn your language for exams. Never once in my life did I take one. I learn it for fun and livelihood. But now I know this forum is a place where learners seek more expert help than free-style discussions. That’s good actually, and I’ll change my “strategy” accordingly.
I wanted to say these to our hard-working moderator 5jj when I got his "warning" this morning, but I thought it'd be better I wrote it here, both as an apology to you and the threadstarter and as a self-defense to possible "house arrest" declared by dear 5jj. If you think this post is inappropriate here, you may move it or remove it when it served its purpose.
Jenny