[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.