Does this sound right?

OK, here's exactly how this question arose. I was in a German class and the expression "Aussteigen Sie nach drei Stationen"+ came up. Sure,+ "nach"+ has more than one equivalent in English, but the first one that came to my mind was "after". I asked if there was any other way of saying the above in German. I don't remember whether the teacher, a German native speaker, said there was or the wasn't, but she said that, well, the English for "nach" (in this context) is "after", so "get off after three stations", is the English equivalent, and so that was fine, wasn't it. "After three stations" in English is counterintuitive to me, and I said so, but the other native speaker in the class, whom I mentioned above, and another class member, a non-native speaker, said that "after" was fine. Our views shared, we moved on.

This is my answer to North American's question, above.

Edited by: italihurr

''Steigen Sie nach drei Stationen aus'' is very unclear, I would say ''steigen Sie an der dritten Station
aus'', that way you know to get off at the third station, the way your teacher said it it could also be the
fourth, if somebody told me that I would asked the third or fourth??

The use of the word "stop", in this context, is colloquial (889's post). It would be said by one person to another either at a station (on the platform, etc.) or while on the train. If we're to get into register, then a recorded railway company announcement might say something like "Passengers for (point X) should alight at the next station".

The (German) expression was either in our textbook or was part of other printed material. It didn't come from the teacher, as such.

Even textbooks or printed material can be unclear, you can say it the way it was written there, still
to me it's not clear which station, I didn't say it was incorrect.

The correct way for the on-board train announcer to say it is (ie)....

"Manchester Piccadilly is the next station stop".
However - as a passenger, either "The next stop" or "The next station" are both fine.

Conductors say "the next station stop" here too.

It refers to the next station, rather than the next danger (stop) signal.
So in fact the next stop, isn't necessarily a station. The station stop - is.

When thinking about or discussing the use of language, the concept of what is "correct" is not always easy to deal with. [I wrote in the first line of my original post "Is it usual ("correct", whatever that means) to say ..... ?] To me, for example, "Manchester Picadilly is the next station stop" sounds very odd. It's constructed according to certain rules of grammar, with the word "station" being used as an adjective/modifier before the word "stop", but I can't say I've ever heard or read it before and wouldn't, myself, say it. Thus, though "the next station stop" follows certain grammatical rules, for me it isn't right (correct) because it breaks -according to my particular version of native English (which shares most but not all features of other versions of native English)- a particular rule of usage. To put it another way, to me it doesn't sound right. (To others it does.)

Battybilly and VinnyD, which is your particular version of native English? Is it as spoken in South Africa, Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, somewhere else?

What does "correct" mean? Some of the language one hears is, for example, non-standard; sometimes one can only say that it's different. An example of this is the different ways in which speakers of standard North American English (as spoken in the USA, at least, as far as I know) and standard British English use the past tense/present perfect (e.g. "Did you have lunch?"/"Have you had lunch?"). Turning to Spanish, variations between the Spanish of Spain and that of Latin America (and between these countries) are considerable. All versions, to return to that word, can be said to be "correct".

There's more about "station stop" here:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2345916