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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In addition to the kanji characters borrowed from China which tell you nothing about how it should be pronounced, Japanese also has two phonetic syllabaries that can easily be used to represent the sound of a word so it can be pronounced at sight. There is a specific one, katakana, which tends to be used for foreign words. That’s why ka-me-ra (from English), ra-me-n (from Chinese) and ku-ra-n-ke (from German) are written that way.
Chinese characters work differently, and don’t tell you how they are pronounced just by looking, although there is a convention so that they can be used phonetically. It just results in a fairly nonsensical “meaning” when you do. The country name “Canada” can be rendered as 加拿大 (Jiānádà) which is pretty close phonetically, but means roughly “add take big”.
So instead, in Chinese a new word is often created that’s evocative of the item or product. Again, using a country name, the United States of America is rendered as 美国 (Meiguo), which means “beautiful country”.
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