@prometheanbound Because of this property of Chinese characters to carry fixed meanings, even if in Japanese Chinese characters are combined in ways that never appear in Chinese, we Chinese can still get some sense of it without further leaning. For instanse, Japanese call "president"(of some state） as "大統領". We don't have that word (we call it "總統"). But we could still understand the word means people of leading positions ---- cause ”大“ means "great", "統" and ”領" both mean "lead“.