Sorry everyone for the late responses, I was out yesterday so I could not respond to them. If you have any specific questions please don't be afraid to ask them, but I feel like it would be a little better if you sent me a message, as this forum has many comments on it already and I'm trying to distinguish the questions from the answers. I was not offended, I can understand where Elizabeth was coming from and I still do (:

Thank you all for being so polite and nice on here, it really is so nice meeting so many people interested in English!

I really hope that I can still clarify some things for you guys if you still have some questions!

Elizabeth

If I were to hear "She directed me to a Polish song when I was studying Polish" I would think that it sounded more like it happened a while ago rather than "while", I am fully aware that both are past-tense, but I was just stating that it sounded like the actions in the sentence happened longer ago than "while".

As for your comment about "backward", I was not aware that she was learning Chinese and I was just stating a general statement about something that many other people have told me was difficult about learning English, especially when attempting to learn longer sentences. In Chinese, although the word order is SVO, that doesn't account for prepositions and articles, as they are slightly different in both languages. I have also heard that long sentences that are stretched out aren't as common in Chinese as they are in English, so it may be backward to add a bunch of words into a sentence and skew the exact meaning while Chinese focuses on a direct meaning (by separating ideas with commas or periods).