Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Vietnamese is much like Chinese, I wouldn't be surprised. Chinese speakers don't specify much. They tend to hollar low-context imperatives at each other, and hope that everyone already knows their job. Linguists call this a "high context" language, because if you don't have a good idea of the existing context you won't figure much out. I suspect it's related to the extremely strict and ridged hierarchies in China,…
Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese. In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but they mean opposites.
So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。
So when people come to me in English and say something like you know, capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law excluded).