There are lots of interesting parallels between English and Japanese. Old English borrowed its alphabet from Latin, and imperfectly represents its sounds in La

There are lots of interesting parallels between English and Japanese. Old English borrowed its alphabet from Latin, and imperfectly represents its sounds in Latin, with a couple extra letters. On the other hand, the Japanese borrowed writing from the Chinese, and after a long struggle, eventually adapted it to perfectly represent every sound in the Japanese language. While retaining the entire Chinese character set. The piece de resistance? You have to figure out whether a character has a Chinese or Japanese reading from context, since most have both. Probably half or more of all Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese. Most borrowings were about a thousand years ago, or more. In a few cases it's not always obvious if a word is even native Japanese, or not. But the sound and spelling are a very strong hint for almost all words in practice. There's a split in numbers. In some places you use Chinese numbers, and in others you use Japanese. A rough equivalent of the mono- bi- tri- etc. nonsense. The same word has sometimes been borrowed from Chinese multiple times, at different times, and from different regions, resulting in different pronunciations. Not unlike English's "warranty" and "guarantee". Which are early and late French pronunciations of the same word. There are Chinese roots used in compound words to describe academic, medical, scientific, religious, governmental, etc. things. And there are native Japanese words used for all sorts of common everyday things. Despite the majority of terms being Chinese in origin, like with English and words of Germanic origin, in many contexts, the majority of words used are native Japanese. Words coined in Japan on Chinese word formation principles have sometimes been adopted in China, particularly around the start of the 20th century with technical terms. Much as how English and French have many terms where you can't even say whether it's really an English or French word originally. It's the same roots used in the same way in both languages and would be obvious to speakers of either language if they needed a new word. And they often need a new word around the same time.