Great! I wonder if they changed that in recent years, because I’m pretty sure I’ve felt frustrated by this before, but you are indeed right that it does take punctuation into account now. Anyway, thanks for pointing this out!

This problem can be overcome by putting the words in quotation marks. Then Google will only show the results that have the three characters right next to each other!

Oh, noes, 被發現了！I actually just type in Swedish and then use Google to produce my articles. 🙂 Joking aside, this is a method that works best when you have a hunch of what might be suitable, but you just want to confirm if it’s right or not. That happens to me all the time in English and more and more frequently in Chinese as well. I write a sentence, encounter a tricky part, just feel that something sounds good without actually knowing how the word I just typed is used, then, after looking it up, finding out tat my usage is actually correct. I attribute this to lots of reading and listening.

Ah-hah! Is that your secret to writing native quality English when you’re not a native speaker, Olle?

I suspect it’s actually the result of your legendary language learning powers.

Praise aside, it is a very good method, and I use it whenever I’m writing in Chinese as well.

As a native speaker, we use “青綠” to express green, “青藍” to express blue/cyan. We don’t use “玄青” much in our daily life.

I’m guessing it’s because the character definitions in most Chinese dictionaries list it as both green and blue (and black):

顏色：(1) 綠色。唐˙劉禹錫˙陋室銘：「草色入簾青。」(2) 藍色。荀子˙勸學：「青取之於藍，而青於藍。」(3) 黑色。如：「玄青」。

As a non-native speaker, my 語感 is not well-developed enough to tell what the “feel” of the character is in everyday use, though.

Definitely more green in there, but there is blue, too.