As a teenager I was obsessed with languages. I got decent at about half a dozen, good enough to read a newspaper or Wikipedia article. I attempted Chinese a few times, never with much zeal, and always gave up from the terror at seeing entries in the dictionary with so many meanings or specific syllables (like jué, which has 125 entries on wiktionary) with so many characters.
Now I have become incredibly fascinated with all things Chinese and, having returned a decade later, am amazed I still remember a fair bit of the peculiarities about which I had read. However, one other thing remains: Terror at the sight of such massive lists of words and the resulting fantasies I have of being trapped in a phantasmagoric forest of ambiguities, doomed to be forever pondering in which context the statement is meant to be interpreted.
Is this really a problem? I have observed cases in Chinese dramas where it seemed like confusion was resulting from these ambiguities (Old man: "I want you to be my student." Girl: "I will not carry your baby! Who do you think I am!"), but not often.
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