Eli5: Why does it seem like Japanese often translates from English phonetically (camera = カメラ ‘kamera’) while Chinese seems to translate conceptually (照相机 ‘zhao xiang ji’ is literally “photo taking machine”)
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Japanese will usually have the native words for new words/concepts in Chinese based characters as well. New words are being added into the dictionary so that there can be an official Japanese word for it.
The thing with Japanese is that they have the two other syllabaries, based on sounds only and not concepts, of which katakana is often used for foreign loan words.
So there is the Japanese word for handkerchief which is 鼻拭き which literally means nose wiper, but only elderly people will know it or use it, maybe. Now the loan word ハンカチ is much more pervasive.
As to why loan words get used over the original Japanese words depends on a lot of things so you kind of have to look at them individually. Words go out of style. They get old fashioned and a new foreign loan word might look or sound more interesting and exotic. A very common reason is that by using the loan word you instantly know it’s a foreign object/concept, so that started to be appealing to people who were modernizing and globalizing.
Sometimes it’s as simple as not wanting to write kanji for every little everyday word and it’s just simple to use kana. This happens even from kanji to hiragana.
The word for cucumber has kanji but in the vast majority of stores you just see the simple きゅうり. Not a loan word so people will hiragana instead of writing out the kanji instead. But then other people will use katakana sometimes too just to make it look different. Basically just people playing around with the language tools they have at their disposal, and then some things change over time by adoption.
Chinese can’t do this because they only have pictographs, so all their sounds come from pictographs which have meaning.
The interesting thing about Japanese loan words is that people who grow up with them often don’t even know what the original words means or is from. アルバイト means part time job but a lot of people don’t know it comes from the German word arbeit. Just that sounds あ・る・ば・い・と together in that order means part time job.
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