難

1. Difficulty: Difficult, arduous, or hard.

2. Calamity: A crisis, disaster, sudden misfortune, plague, or political purge.

• As a modifier preceding a verb: Functions as “hard to [verb]” or “difficult to [verb],” occasionally shifting toward “scarcely” or “rarely.”
• As an adjective/predicate: Describes a path, task, or state of being.
• As a noun: Frequently serves as the object of verbs meaning “to encounter,” “to avoid,” or “to escape.”

• Inability: When used to mean “unable,” it implies an inability based on difficulty rather than an absolute lack of capacity (distinguished from 不能).
• Collocations: Often paired with 艱 (jiān) to emphasize grueling physical or systemic struggle, or with 患 (huàn) to denote calamity or affliction. In philosophical or argumentative contexts, the sense may lean toward “problematic,” “tenuous,” or “difficult to resolve.”

• Variant: U+96BE is an orthographic variant and is semantically identical.

Because the senses for "difficulty" (nán) and "calamity" (nàn) are graphically identical, disambiguation relies on syntax: nouns generally indicate calamity, while modifiers and predicates generally indicate difficulty.