If you're an ESL speaker or something thinking this will be useful, I'd suggest caution (heh, changed that from 'very wary').
Many of the proposed alternatives I saw clicking through 'random' have a subtlety or specificity that the original 'very adj' doesn't - so it sounds like you mean something you might not (probably don't) if you say 'colossal' instead of 'tall' or 'emaciated' instead of 'skinny' for example.
And 'pungent' instead of 'tasty' is just plain wrong.
Just to give my experience, I actually didn't know what that acronym meant. I tried googling it but "ESL speaker" only gave results about loudspeakers and just "ESL" was mostly about some German Company.
I even thought it had to do with sign language at first but didn't get the meaning of the sentence in that case!
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A little off-topic but that makes me think of another HN thread some months ago talking about acronyms like "SRE" or "SWE" (and some others I since forgot), that many HNers assumed to be understood by everyone.
Many non-american/english developers actually never encountered those (including I, I've been software engineer since at least 8 years and never saw those terms beside HN, like I would think most in my country) and it led to the same kind of incomprehension.
I tried googling all three + "abbreviation" so for example "SRE abbreviation" and the first result for all three was the actual term for the abbreviation.
I thought so (as an english-as-first-language), but I've met a bunch of people around the world who didn't know what ESL meant. I get the feeling the phrase is most known in American.
Well, my first wife was a schoolteacher, and my daughter is a schoolteacher. My second wife was a careers adviser. My son taught English as a second language for a while. So perhaps it's "trade jargon" that I have integrated.
You're very right (Or "You're perfect", as this is suggesting!)
I clicked through a few random ones. For "very ill" it gave "lifeless" and for "very frustrated" it gave "infuriating", both of which probably aren't what you mean!
Many of the proposed alternatives I saw clicking through 'random' have a subtlety or specificity that the original 'very adj' doesn't - so it sounds like you mean something you might not (probably don't) if you say 'colossal' instead of 'tall' or 'emaciated' instead of 'skinny' for example.
And 'pungent' instead of 'tasty' is just plain wrong.