"I wish I knew you before." instead of "had known (I'd known)" you before, which would be in line with traditional grammar.

@maxxpf

I have heard people making that 'mistake' (using a simple past instead of the past perfect in Third Conditionals) a few times, and you indeed sometimes hear it in songs etc, but what do you think about the examples I gave in the OP? Would you also agree that it's impossible to say that, or at least that it's not common at all?

Thank you!

Sorry, I only just saw your #1 agree...

Thank you!

conditional sentences type I, according to my book - and according to all the grammar books I know, would be:

If the flat is in a nice area, I will be glad.

Wie auch immer, zum Einsatz kommt beim conditional clause type II das conditonal I (would + infinitive), und das ist hier ja noch nicht einmal strittig! :-)

Kauf dir doch vielleicht ganz einfach einmal eine aktuelle Schulgrammatik! :-)

Du darfst aber gerne auch einmal hier reinschauen, aber nur, weil du es bist: :-)

More typical would be:

(Please note that I am not the author of that grammar page, and neither am I the author of the schoool grammars that we use. Still, I am bound by law to teach that it is the standard to use the will-future here. But occasionally I do tell my students that practical usage sometimes differs from the strict grammar rules and I hope very much that that is okay with you.)

#17

- I do have some very few students whose command of English I just find astonishing, at least when they have a good day. But usually that is the result of their own participation in English language blogs or because they are Dutch and watch English language movies in the original language at home - with subtitles. It's not usually a result of our German school education. But so many just don't want to bother to precisely express in English what they feel or think.

edit: Be sure that we do not always focus on grammar only. Also we do make them aware of differences between formal und informal usage, we address the topic of different variants of English in different parts of the world, of different dialects and so fourth, which was all not the case a generation ago, at least not to the same extent as today.

re #18 von maxxpf

An die native speakers: Sagt man eigentlich für 'einen guten Tag haben' (im Sinne des Kontexts) im Englischen 'have a good day'? - d.h. zum Beispiel, sagt man: sb. doesn't have a good day today....

Ist das idiomatisch? Mich wurmt gerade, dass ich es nicht weiß.

I wasn't going to go there, but ...

I think most people would use the progressive there: someone's (not) having a good day. In #18, too: at least when they're having a god day. But more to the point, I don't think that's the proper phrase for what I think is supposed to be expressed: on a good day

Without more context (and if I were really expressing a condition) my natural tendency would be to say

"It would be nice if the flat were in a nice area.",

though (for social reasons) I would probably be more likely to actually say "was" in real life.

 

However, particularly with the first example, there might be circumstances where a Brit would say  "It would be nice if the flat is in a nice area."

There may even be (reasonable but linguistically complicated) contexts where I would not necessarily classify it as non-standard.

 

There are a number of complicating issues, one of which is that (pragmatically) " It would be nice if ..." often introduces something other than a proper remote condition; IOW the first example is not really comparable with

"If I found a two-bedroom flat in the Herne Hill area for less than half a million, I would buy it immediately."

And a lot of them have probably googled me because they have found out that a piece of so-called literary criticism of mine was published online by the online platform of the Düsseldorf-based Rheinische Post and you can find it very easily by just googling my name.

I have occasionally mentioned that I have started some threads and have been referring to others like this one I did not participate in:

(We're watching - that is: have to watch "Billy Elliot" - at the moment.)

#20, #21: I had checked the expression "have a good day" before posting it and got the impression that it is used by native speakers to some degree, even in the present simple:

#24 - "have" is a stative verb as well, in our grammar book, and I do not think that it is used in a way like "have a party" or "have breakfast" in this context.

By the way, dude has criticised me from digressing from the original OP's question, he and a lot of others have done that even more extensively than I did. Why don't you all go ahead to deal with the original OP's question or move on to other threads.

You would say "s/he's not having a good day today".