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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The benefit of katakana is that we can translate things phonetically, while also butchering the word while at it.
Like how sandwich become サンド (sand).
Much easier to use and write, thus gaining a lot of popularity.
But It’s not like there is no proper kanji for camera, 写真機 (shashin ki) is still used. Which means photo taking machine.
Though nowadays It’s more commonly used for the photo booth.
The Chinese characters used in both written Chinese and Japanese are mostly complete words (eg. 机 machine).
However written Japanese has had additional phonetic characters (kana) since 800AD, Chinese only got phonetic characters in the early 1900s.
So there is a history of being able to write words out phonetically in Japanese, while in Chinese the tradition is to make a new word out of existing words.
Sometimes they do it phonetically in Chinese though, for example Canada is 加拿大, literally increase hold big, pronounced Jiānádà.
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.
The same reason English adds foreign loan words and German makes up new compound words.
They’re completely different languages from completely different cultures that just happen to share an alphabet.
Because Chinese, Japanese and Korean all use kanji we in the west can think they are similar languages like French and Italian. But they aren’t at all. They just got their writing system from China.
So there is no real reason to believe they would use words in the same way. They are different at almost every level. Even their history and the way they have interacted with English speaking countries is different and influential. Japan consumes a looooooot more English speaking media.
This is kind of similar to how English tends to import terms from other languages, while German more often combines existing ones.
This is called a semantic calque and it used to be used in Japanese. They were used alongside a system called ateji (当字) which used the on-yomi of kanji to approximate sounds in borrowed words. They both fell out of favor after the postwar language reforms, with katakana superseding both in most cases. Lots and lots of Japanese semantic calques still exist, though — the days of the week, lots of scientific terms, and geographic names like the Pacific Ocean (太平洋).
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