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.
You're saying that you're telling facts and not an opinion, right?
That's right.
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.
People tend to state a lot of things as facts after all and then it turns out they're wrong or there's more to it.
That's absolutely right. The world is full of bullshitters. Throughout life, you'll learn ways to deal with this, hopefully.
I suppose, you could argue I shouldn't doubt a teacher telling me how a basic preposition works and I'd see where you're coming from.
Do I really need to 'argue' this?
Oh, I think I should've phrased it "Okay, I can see how 'aiming at' can be seen as describing a direction." Or maybe not?
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.
We're moving into brainy territory I'm starting to feel like an imposter that doesn't know what he's talking about but wants to participate in the conversation and sound smart.
You'd do better just to listen to our answers. You don't have to try and sound smart.
By line of thought I meant the comparison to German prepositions. Don't know if I misused the phrase but what I was trying to say was that since I'm sure you understood what kind of preposition I was looking for, especially after getting the full picture because of me having made the comparison to German prepositions, that makes me trust your answer more.
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.
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.
I meant the question if "on" or "at" works for blowing at a random object (as well as which of them means what. I didn't specifically ask the latter but needed to know it).
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?
Oh, I had forgotten about that already because I didn't like how it sounded and just dismissed it mentally.
I don't know what you expect me to say to this. What does it matter whether you like it or not? What does 'liking it' even mean?
