« first day (1584 days earlier)      last day (1640 days later) » 

user402022
12:15 AM
Hi. Could you please tell me if in this dimension you would expect many native speakers to get from something like "City X is not a step down from City Y" that this is about physical distance, like "next door" or "a step across the pond" something but possibly involving elevation, instead of a qualitative comparison (living standards etc.)?
 
user402022
It seems like a translation engine translated that to physical distance in my language, and it really feels like twilight zone bs to me.
 
Anonymous
12:36 AM
Seems weird. Not a step down from should mean something like ‘not worse than’.
 
AIQ
AIQ
6:43 AM
Are expectations or standards in EL&U much higher? I seem to be doing rather poorly there.
 
 
4 hours later…
ColleenV
ColleenV
10:55 AM
@AIQ yes, the standards for research on ELU are higher. On ELL we expect people to have trouble researching their questions because they’re still learning English. On ELU the expectation from most of the community is that you are fluent and serious enough about the study of English to do more research than a simple dictionary look up.
there is a meta post that describes the differences between the two sites, I will see if I can find it.
88
A: What is the difference between ELU and ELL?

J.R.ELU is a site intended for "serious linguists." Over time, many non-native speakers stumbled across ELU, and would ask questions that native speakers considered very basic. This caused mixed feelings: on one hand, as the board became flooded with more and more basic and trivial questions, some us...

 
 
9 hours later…
user402022
8:00 PM
@snailcar Thank you there!
 
ColleenV
ColleenV
9:08 PM
I think some folks here might find it interesting that John Lawler has compiled a list of his answers on various English topics:
11
Q: ELU answer topic file

John LawlerThis is more of an announcement than a question. But it's intended for Meta. For a class I'm giving, I've recently made up links to my answers here, on various grammatical topics. This list is on my web site at http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/ELUanswerlist.html The individual topics covered, s...

discussion
 
M.A.R.
M.A.R.
OMG OMG OMG
 
AIQ
AIQ
9:23 PM
That is pretty cool - wow. I wonder if I can do it too. But people might object to that if everyone starts doing so in meta.
@ColleenV Thanks for this ColleenV. I am very intimidated to ask questions there. I wasn't sure if my questions were too elementary for ELU or if my research was lacking.
 
M.A.R.
M.A.R.
@AIQ It's more like a well-known (on ELU) academic scholar sharing their relevant off-site content
You'd need some time to really establish yourself in the community
 
ColleenV
ColleenV
@AIQ Some simple questions can be very interesting linguistically - it's hard for people sometimes to see past the simplicity of a question to the interesting parts that the person asking doesn't have enough knowledge to highlight.
 
AIQ
AIQ
@M.A.R. I agree. More reading and writing for me then. :)
@ColleenV True. I also think it is the kind of questions I ask - they are very narrow and specific to my work/topic. And so they don't really help the community.
 
ColleenV
ColleenV
@AIQ It may be worth thinking about how you might broaden them to a more general question then.
 
Anonymous
10:11 PM
@M.A.R. He's actually well known outside of ELU, too.
 

« first day (1584 days earlier)      last day (1640 days later) »