this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2023
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Chinese doesn't have a phonetic alphabet, so basically all the writing is in hanzi. Japanese kanji were basically just taken from hanzi, but they also have a phonetic alphabet, so they don't need all the words to have a kanji equivalent.
Also, there's much less overlap in pronunciation of Japanese words than in Chinese. It makes sense that you would have more characters to represent more words when their pronunciation is identical.
That wasn't my point.
My point was he was waxing rhapsodic about how cunning it was that the Japanese combined Kanji when they basically just used (a subset of) Chinese writing where that combined Hanzi has been a feature for literally thousands of years (in various forms).