Chinese is not lack of characters and words to describe things. There are lots of ways to do that.
- (big) the synonym of 大. 大, 巨, 宏, 偉, 碩, 巨大, 巨大無比, 碩大無朋, 無窮, 無盡, 無崖, 無窮無盡, 無止境, 堂煌, 海量, 寬敞, 不可尺量, 重大. It is overlapped with wide (寬, 闊), deep (深), heavy(重), large quantity (豐). - (good) the synonym of 好. 好, 佳, 優, 正, 良, 妙, 善, 美. (best) 頂級, 極品, 完美, 完善, 盡善盡美, 美不勝收, 嘆爲觀止, 無宇倫比. You can combine them like 良好, 優良, 妙好. You can describe the extreme with 極, 絕, 最, 頂 like 極佳, 極好, 絕妙, 頂好. In spoken languages, 誇啦啦, 頂呱呱. If you describe a good song, it could be 天籟 or 天籟之音, or 絕唱.
Above are just a few of them. It is too numerous to exhaust the list.
10. Hanyu Pinyin (which is the one everyone uses) overloads every second letter, to make it more condensed.
r = r, or zhr, tchzr, or something like that (it's up to the speaker)
j = zh (kinda), as in Beijing
zh = j (WTF? Are they trying to make things hard?)
z = ts
c = ts ... but a different ts to z. (aspirated)
q = tch
x = tsh
none of which should be confused with ...
ch = ch (dark)
sh = sh (dark)
s = s
That's about it for consonants. Remember to carry a pack of tissues.
11. Then there's vowels. Don't get me started. There's lots of vowels, and getting them wrong will completely change what you said.
12. Idioms. Though this relates to number 9 - cultural differences, and I guess it's an issue in all languages.
13. Regional dialects. Every village has it's own language, which isn't really comprehensible to anyone else. You can speak Chinese, and still not be understood, simply because you are talking to somebody who doesn't know putonghua (standard).
Chinese has some advantages. It's rare to run into sesquipedalian loquaciousness, if only because few people can be bothered learning all the synonyms. There are synonyms (of course), but they just don't seem to get used as much as in English.
- I can only thing of one way to say "big" in Chinese. In English, there's "big, large, enormous, huge, gigantic, gargantuan, grand", and about a dozen others. In Chinese, if something is big, it's '大 (da)', or maybe 'very big'. Except the great wall, which is the "long wall" (not big).
- If something is "good", it's "好 (hao)", or "really good", or "very good", or "double good" or possibly "佳 (jia)". Not "good, excellent, splendid, magnificent, superb, superlative, wonderful, fantastic, marvelous", or anything else your third grade teacher said about the short story that even you knew was crap.
The best way I've found to learn a little Chinese is to get a idiom dictionary, and look up idioms. You learn interesting stuff about the culture (lots of food and trade analogies, mythology, nature, and some analogies to bodily functions that are so visceral Kevin Smith used one in Clerks), and it's a good way to practice common words.
But yeah, it's not easy.