ghoul
Member
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2024
- Member Type
- Interested in Language
- Native Language
- German
- Home Country
- Germany
- Current Location
- Germany
Perhaps I should have less prejudice then.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.
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.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.
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Do I really need to 'argue' this?
That's not to say your input isn't valuable to me, hence I said that I accepted your answer.
Got it.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?
I'll try to be more conscious about this.You'd do better just to listen to our answers. You don't have to try and sound smart.
Yes.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.
Noted.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.
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.What does it matter whether you like it or not? What does 'liking it' even mean?
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.