The word very is overused, as I mentioned previously. There are so many other intensifiers (adverbs to make adjectives and verbs stronger) and mitigators (adverbs to make adjectives and verbs weaker) that can make your English sound far more interesting. You are not a boring person in your native language, so don’t sound boring in English.
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Alternatives to ‘very’:
- amazingly
- extremely
- incredibly
- remarkably
- significantly
- so
- truly
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Alternatives to ‘not very’:
- not incredibly
- not so
- not terribly
The alternatives to ‘not very’ make a much shorter list because other than those three, everything else sounds a little unnatural or has a lot of exceptional cases making it incredibly difficult to use.
The British Council has an extremely helpful page about this on their website.