千辛万苦
qiān xīn wàn kǔ
In real, traceable use. Part of the curated seed collection; community review is coming.
Traditional: 千辛萬苦
Countless hardships and difficulties. Typically used to say that something was achieved, found or reached only after a long and painful struggle.
Muôn vàn vất vả, gian nan. Thường dùng để nói một việc phải trải qua bao khó nhọc mới làm được, tìm được hay tới được nơi.
Register: neutral
Examples
Editorial example (illustrative, not a corpus attestation) — awaiting a native-speaker check
Sources & notes
Hán-Việt bridge batch 062 (2026-11-13). Headword, Traditional form and pinyin checked against CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0) source ↗ · Hán-Việt reading: Unihan kVietnamese source ↗ · Vietnamese cognate: Idiomer entry “thiên tân vạn khổ” (thien-tan-van-kho). Definition, literal gloss and example sentence are original; the example has not had a native-speaker check yet.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “千辛万苦” mean?
Countless hardships and difficulties. Typically used to say that something was achieved, found or reached only after a long and painful struggle. Literally: a thousand toils, ten thousand bitternesses
Is “千辛万苦” formal or informal?
千辛万苦 is generally neutral.