I once got into a huge argument (well, not so much an argument, but a mass confusion over my choice of words) with my wife when I said ‘Chinese is difficult, but that’s not because it’s “複雜”。Of course, we were talking back and forth to tease out what I really meant because you wouldn’t say “不複雜” unless you meant to imply “easy”, and furthermore, you’d come off as though you were bragging about your ability.
Now, what I meant was that Chinese doesn’t hit you with a tonne of rules that make it hard to predict how you ought to phrase what you want to say: It’s relatively straightforward what order the words in your sentence will come in, the difficulty lies point blank in the memorization work (and, after this conversation, making sure you check the definitions of the words you learn properly.)
Anyway, the word I was looking for, and learned that day was 紊亂， which does a better job at translating ‘complex’. I still stand by that point, just because 紊亂 translates to ‘complex’ better than 複雜 despite 複雜 being what the dictionary will give you, that’s the fault of the dictionary, not a complexity in the language.
A more minor example; if you’ve just looked up the name of a vegetable, or tree or something in Chinese, either because you saw the chinese word or just wanted to know “what’s this in Chinese” a quick google image search to double check if you and your dictionary are on the same page about the english name of the vegetable is a generally good idea.
Got any more words that you were lead to believe meant something slightly different than what you meant when you went to use them?
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