It's not my favorite way of expressing it, but I felt it managed to get the idea across

It's "wrong", I suppose, if it fails to communicate. But does it need to be totally normal? You aren't telling people to say "look along the road"

So I didn't comment

Since I thought it got the point across

I'd use a diagram :-)

Prepositions are tricky.

Oh, I just figured out how to type dïäçrítįčś and such on my phone

I'm so proud!

I don't think I often mention being a native speaker in my comments or answers.

I'm not sure it's always relevant.

Haha! I'm not too sure what to think about that

No one uses Windows 8. It is the undiscovered country

I wish I were able to persuade MaulikV more often. Sometimes he is very resistant to what I have to say. Of course, I've learned things from him too, like fully-fledged just the other day

I think my sentences come out rather differently when I type on my phone.

It seems that speed of entry influences how I put words together.

This is phone me!

Computer me talks different.

Even if you type very quickly, you can most likely talk faster

Converting kana to kanji makes entering Japanese comparatively slower, and the difference from speech more marked

It would be harder to read

Readers are used to kanji. That's the only reason

No, rōmaji is even harder to read because you have even less practice reading it

If everyone used it all the time, it'd be fine, but they don't. I started with the Japanese writing system from day one

Japanese is written in Japanese 99% of the time, so training yourself to read romanized Japanese quickly is of only marginal utility

It pays to associate the sounds and words mentally with Japanese writing

I consider rōmaji an advanced tool rather than a beginner's tool

It's useful for morphological analysis

Kana represent CV pairs primarily, but the language itself is made of smaller units

But I'm not sure it's helpful to beginners to teach them a modern linguistics-style morphological analysis

They won't be able to follow the steps to analytically construct words in real-time as they speak, after all

Better to teach some examples and show how they're written in Japanese, and let them generalize

Japanese is after all extremely regular

Jorden's method does involve teaching morphology explicitly using a structuralist analysis

I'm afraid that it doesn't work well for everyone :-(. But some students report great results

I learned how to conjugate verbs in Japanese without explicitly learning the rules, actually

I only learned the rules after I already knew how to so it :-)

Do, not so. Dumb phone

More traditional analysis is based on kana.

Instead of sin-ana-i sin-imas-u sin-u sin-e sin-oo it presents si-na-na-i si-ni-ma-su si-nu si-ne si-no-o

But you don't have to learn either analysis to say stuff in Japanese

In the modern analysis, it has one stem sin- to which everything attaches: negative -anai, for example.

In the traditional analysis, it has five forms: sina, sini, sinu, sine, sino, and different things attach to different forms.

So negative nai attaches to the first one, sina

That makes it more complicated than it has to be. It's all because traditional linguists weren't willing to analyze beyond the kana level

I've also found that most students of Japanese are resistant to the modern analysis for one reason or another.

No, learners have a perception that only the traditional grammatical analysis put forth by native speakers is valid, 1. because it aligns with the Japanese writing system and 2. because the modern analysis has its roots in western structuralism. The made-in-Japan analysis is felt to be more genuine, the "real thing"

But modern linguists inside and outside Japan have moved on from the traditional analysis.

Unfortunately Chomskyan linguistics is now popular among linguists working on Japanese.

Japanese too has prescriptive and descriptive approaches

For example, it's said that zenzen must be followed with a negative. But this rule has never been widely followed, and was in fact invented in the 1950s

That along sounds okay to me.

It is true that zenzen "completely" strongly anticipates a negative predicate, though. So much so that you can say zenzen by itself and the omitted verb will be assumed to be negative; it's taken as "not at all" rather than "completely" in that case

These examples give me the sense of turning my head to look along the road, while look down the road makes me think it's in front of me

Oh! Wow

The closest thing I can think of in Japanese is midori "green"

Midori is an old word referring to plants

But it only came to mean the color green in the 40s and later

It can

Until then, ao covered both blue and green. Well, it still does, but often the primary association is blue these days since midori appeared for green

Sawasdee!

In real life I don't say hello or even hi to friends. I say hey

Nico, that seems like a reasonable point of view

I already upvoted, so I have no carrot to offer

It might just be me, but along still makes me think of turning my head while standing to the side of the road

Somehow along doesn't seem great there

You can make a diagram by taking a photo of looking down the road and drawing an arrow on it in MS Paint :-)

"If the road goes north-south, looking down the road could mean looking north or looking south."

It's whichever direction is ahead and parallel to the road, not perpendicular

Oh, sometimes localities do have fixed up/down directional metaphors

But it didn't occur to me that it might apply here

I suppose real height can override that, too--if the road ahead goes up a steep enough hill, I'm not sure you could look down it

I might say it anyway, though.

That might all be a red herring in this context

I'm not sure the local up/down directional metaphors come into play

Sure, I go up to San Francisco, not down, but if I were standing on the 280 looking toward SF I might say I'm looking down the road

Have you searched COCA for an example?

It only really makes sense in a larger context, not as part of a sentence in isolation, I think

That said, standing on top of a hill might incline me toward saying look down the road

What for, Ice Girl? It sounds like you need a paragraph for it

I suppose you could fit it into a sufficiently complex single sentence

You didn't answer though. What for?

The arbitrariness of your request makes it sound like homework

You can probably find one on COCA

We, not we've

The Corpus of Contemporary American English. I linked you one tome

Time

I'm on my phone and don't have a link handy, but you can find it on Google.

Damkerng, SE uses a really primitive search

I'm not sure it will do what you want

Search for http said by Damkerng perhaps

chat.stackexchange.com/…

Sad times

Reza Shah's national modernization continued well into the 1930s. The University of Tehran was inaugurated in 1934, and, in 1935, the Ancient Iran Museum was opened, along with the Iranian Farhangestan, the Academy of Literature and Language. Still functioning today, the Academy, with over 70 highly educated members, was responsible for replacing foreign words with Persian ones.

By way of contrast, 1935 also saw the millennium celebration to honor the birth of Ferdowsi, the great Iranian poet, who spent thirty years of his life saving Iranian culture from the Arab invasion. He finished his book of poetry on Iran shortly before he died. He always referred to his beloved country as Iran, and his masterwork, Shahnameh, reflects the important epic, legendary history of the country.

Yes

I managed to do it on my phone

But it doesn't have any meaning out of context

Nor there

But, as Socrates suggests in the Republic and liberal political theorists like Alexis de Tocqueville have argued since, belief in some kind of god and the immortality of the soul is an almost essential foundation of a decent political order. Nietzsche himself, by way of contrast, is famous for having declared that God is dead and that there is no such thing as a soul, immortal or otherwise.

"By similar means"?

I don't recognize that phrase as a transition opposite to "by way of contrast"

I would understand it if it were used that way but I think it's considerably less common

Of the four results in COCA, three seemed to be using the phrase literally

The last I wasn't sure about

That sentence uses it literally, Damkerng, not as a transition opposite to by way of contrast

Hello! I should sleep.

Good night!

theonion.com/articles/15-most-common-misspellings,35595/#1