[shullbitt0r]

Because that's cheating! I'm half kidding but you are arguing about price, mainly. Not why the cheaper (free?) content is lacking. You could also just afford a personal teacher and taken to the extreme, a personal translator so you wouldn't need to learn the language at all, which would be cheating. Except that you might have a personal desire to speak the language. What's the problem with Chinese that free offerings are inferior?

It is just chaotic is all I could infer from a first look. I mean English can be pretty messy already and maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language. It's not that your coeds were being cheap, perhaps, it could just be disappointment for something as basic to cost anything at all, and relieve that it's not their personal shortcoming, but just an externalized advantage. You seem to say not even $20 was low enough, have I got that right at least?

[KMag]

> Maybe a specific Chinese dialect will be more regular than the bigger picture of the whole language.

Standard written Chinese is based on the grammar of spoken Mandarin. If someone mentions a Chinese dictionary without mentioning a particular dialect, they're almost certainly referring to Standard Written Chinese (essentially Mandarin).

Also, Chinese is less a single language than the Romance languages are a single language. The more far-flung dialects share less in common than, say Italian and Spanish. If Portugal were a province of Spain, Portuguese would probably be considered a dialect of Spanish. As my Linguistics professor used to say, "A language is a dialect with an army." One rarely deals with "the whole Chinese language", if by that you mean the union of all of the dialects. That would be like dealing simultaneously with Romanian, Portuguese, Romansh, French, Italian and Spanish as a single entity.

[thaumasiotes]

> It's not that your coeds were being cheap, perhaps, it could just be disappointment for something as basic to cost anything at all

Dictionaries are not basic in the slightest. I'm constantly frustrated that the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is still not very good.

Here's an example. The Mandarin word for "protect" is 保护 bǎohù. As a matter of semantics, protecting involves three roles: (1) the protector; (2) the beneficiary; (3) a danger to be warded off. In English, (1) is marked by being the subject of the verb protect, (2) is marked by being the object, and (3) is optionally marked by being the object of a complementary prepositional phrase headed by from: in

    1E. I will protect her from going hungry.

role (1) is "I", role (2) is "her", and role (3) is "going hungry".

A quality dictionary will include all of that information if you look up protect. But the state of the art in Chinese/English dictionaries is to note that 保护 is a verb, that it means "protect", and to provide a few example sentences, none of which feature role (3) at all. I had to ask a Chinese person how to indicate the danger involved in protecting, which it turns out is marked by an entire complementary clause:

    1Z: 我保护她免挨饿 wǒ bǎohù tā miǎn ái'è

Translating the syntax directly into English, this is something like "I protect her to avoid going hungry". There is no possible way of learning the correct usage of 保护 from a Chinese/English dictionary at the moment, as none of them saw fit to include this information. You're certainly not going to get there by analogy to English.