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[old34]

Back on point, "naughty" annoys me, too. Chinese think a "naughty child" is ke ai (cute).

In my Christmas lesson, I teach them Santa's dictum: "You better watch out who's naughty or nice, Santa Claus is coming to town." And going to give ""naughty" children a lump of coal in their stocking. This is the first time my students hear/understand that westerners don't consider "naughty" children to be cute.

[adamsmith]

How about convenient and comfortable. Does anyone else see these being used where other words would be much more appropriate? I cant think of any examples of the top of my head at the moment but I remember hearing it all the time and having to stop and think of alternative ways of saying it.

[kitano]

Back on point, "naughty" annoys me, too. Chinese think a "naughty child" is ke ai (cute).

In my Christmas lesson, I teach them Santa's dictum: "You better watch out who's naughty or nice, Santa Claus is coming to town." And going to give ""naughty" children a lump of coal in their stocking. This is the first time my students hear/understand that westerners don't consider "naughty" children to be cute.

I consider naughty to be a cute word.

[BrandeX]

In popular modern culture I get the impression it is more commonly used with sexual connotation.

[lindamao]

Try comparing stubborn and determined. First compare the denotative meaning (if you have an overhead put up a sheet with the dictionary definitions - they are pretty close to identical in my Longman)then describe a disagreement between you and say, your spouse. Of course, you are determined and he/she is stubborn.

[bobrage]

"Childish" is normally misused - students think it is a good thing.

"Basic" is another one too: I think the Chinese for "fundamental" or "core principles" is mistakenly translated into "basic". 

"Communicate" is often taken to be a more formal way of saying "talk", as in "I like to communicate with my teacher."

I wonder if anyone who is good at Chinese can give us some reverse examples?

[Pashley]

In the technical papers I edit, I quite often see a series of steps with the final one introduced by "At last" where it should clearly be "Finally". Connotation is really an issue there!

They also overuse and misuse "famous" and "popular"; "well-known" or "widely used" would be far more idiomatic when the topic is computational techniques.

Is the difference between "a working woman" and "a working girl" worth discussion?

There are a whole range of things you can do with political speech, though here you'd need to tread carefully. I once saw an exercise a colleague had based on three newspaper accounts of the same event. Two were the Guardian and the Telegraph, about as far left and right as major British papers get.

Consider the choices in sentences like:

In 1949, the Kuomintang [fled|retreated|were driven out] to Taiwan.

In 1959, [China|the Communists|the central government] [invaded|liberated] T.