3 ms·

TIL Japanese kanjis are like German words, composed to make a new meaning. Quite insightful. Is this also the case for chinese usage of Kanji? I vaguely remembe

• hsn915 4y ago
  Japanese inherited this property from Chinese. You can tell by the word ordering. Japanese normally places the verb after the subject/object, but when a word of composed of two Kanjis, the verb comes first. Example: 来店 coming to a store. 来 = come, 店 = store In "regular" Japanese, it would be 店に来る "to come to a store". Not only is the readin completely different ("raiten" vs "mise ni kuru"), the word ordering is the opposite.
• stefncb 4y ago
  Compound nouns are likely my favourite linguistic feature ever. Can't tell you why.
• tmtvl 4y ago
  In Chinese creative hanzi combination happens a lot more than in Japanese, as in Japanese foreign concepts tend to get transliterated into katakana first, though sometimes you do get kanji combinations, like vending machine -> jidouhanbaiki (自動販売機): automatic selling machine.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]