You may or may not be aware that Shanghai is a city with additional dog restrictions.

If you are going to live in Shanghai, you need to contact the property management of where you are going to live to see if any of these will affect you.
I think there may even be a restriction on the number of dogs per building, which is why I mention it.

@blobbles

I agree 100% with your last post.

It is far more likely to be a person's limited linguistic ability in L2 that limits their ability to express themselves, than it is to be a problem with the mechanics of the language.
Even a very good knowledge of a second language will be limited when compared to the mother tongue. A lot of what we say has nothing to do with the words or grammar.
English e.g. "Can you close the window" = I am feeling cold.
And then there is all the idiomatic language and similes. etc.
'the door has a knob', 'the man has a knob', 'the man is a knob', etc.
Chinese is just a rich as, but this kind of thing is not taught, because there is just so much of it, you just need to be brought up with it (i.e. native speaker).

I have heard people complain that there is only a limited vocab in the Chinese language. I even had one person try to tell me that the Chinese only have one word for 'dog'. I think not. His dictionary only had one direct translation for dog.

Is there such a thing as a Chinese Thesaurus on the market? But even if there is, you need to be careful of using the wrong synonym for the context you are trying to work in.

Yep, being super-tough really works. The US has one of the highest (if not the highest) percentage of its poplulation in jail, out of all the developed nations.

Disagree

It is easy to confuse 'dong' (East) and 'che' (vehicle) and write the wrong one down. But easy to see them in context of a word or sentence.
Another common mistake is to use the wrong 'che' charachter, the equivalent of a spelling mistake perhaps.

In English it is easier to read, than to write without spelling mistakes. In school we were always reading at a level ahead of our writing abililty. There is a very good reason for this. Words on their own have no meaning. Chinese charachters on their own have even less meaning, as they are only part of a word, which itself only takes meaning from its context.