Okay, Silver. Remember that when we give suggestions, we generally try to stick as closely as possible to your original sentence, making the minimum number of changes for it to pass as natural.
However, sometimes we have to read into what you're trying to say, which is often quite difficult. You'll remember how I've advised you recently to tell us exactly how you mean to use your sentences in context, by creating mini-dialogues, for example. I hope you understand very clearly that this is because the exact phrasing of any sentence depends on the context within which it is used. So when we read your sentences, which are invariably imagined to be part of a conversation, we must try to imagine what has been said directly before. In a sentence that is part of a conversation, the areas of expression that are highly dependent on context include reference phrases, word order, linking words, and discourse markers, to name just four big ones.
In the sentence in this thread, the phrase At that time is an example of a reference time phrase, because that time points to a time that has been mentioned previously in the conversation. My decision to move it from the end of your sentence to the beginning was based purely on how I was imagining the previous part of the conversation to play out, and what you really mean to say. You'll also notice that unlike Tarheel, I made a decision to remove any reference to the fact that the language in question was English. This was again based on the way that I was imagining the conversation to go, which was that the listener knows full well that the speaker is talking about English. You forced me to make a decision I shouldn't have needed to make, and it may have been ill-made. I still don't know. Tarheel chose to keep the element of specifying which language in his suggestion.
When you don't provide enough context for us (as I've asked, and am asking you to do yet again), it makes us work harder than I think we ought to, and it often means that we can't really provide you with suggestions that work naturally within the specific context of use. And that is what you really need, in my opinion, in order to take your English up towards the level of a native speaker. Please take more time in future to think about how your sentences work in the context of the wider discourse. If you do, you'll get more valuable answers from us.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
