"...you've used the imperative tense, the one used for giving orders."
Yes, I know that much. It's a figure of speech -> more like a desperate wish. Does this one not exist in the UK?
Thanks for telling me about the imperative tense, though.
In English one uses a different tense and the imperative word is used as an adverb to make it clear that it is rhetoric, not an order, so one might say: "You must be able to see that." (declarative) or "Surely you must be able to see that?" (rhetorical or interrogative, but almost always rhetorical).
I'm sorry. We OK now?
Of course.
This forum is, perforce, a short, sharp lesson in English comprehension for the non-English speakers. As long as linguistic misunderstandings get sorted out quickly and politely it is of no consequence. I knew what you meant by "you must (be able to) see this" and indeed, in everyday speech the "(be able to)" part might get elided*, but it was a useful hook to hang my argument that perhaps you were outside your language "comfort zone" on.
English can be a struggle, it throws around conditional clauses like no other language, and frequently we English speakers do that without noticing and without understanding that, for native speakers of some other languages, that can be very hard to follow and understand**. At least we can all be grateful that we are not speaking highly formal
Hochdeutsch and waiting all year for the verb to come along.
*Elision - The deliberate omission of sounds, words or even whole phrases from a language such as "I've" instead of "I have".
**Deliberately constructed with exactly that kind of conditional clause. A clean version would be: "Frequently we native English speakers use complex conditional clauses without realizing that we are doing so, and without understanding how hard that kind of English is for some non-English speakers to follow."