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I'm interested in how this compactness changes the expressiveness and evolution of the language. In English, as in other languages written in the latin alphabet, you can make changes to the spelling of a word and create new meanings rather fluidly and it's usually easy for the reader to comprehend. I have no knowledge of Japanese, but are there similar possibilities? How do new words/slang get created?

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Japanese is little different from English on stuff like this - new words crop up, die out, get borrowed from abroad etc., as you'd expect. Of course this doesn't involve creating any new kanji, but slang and such is usually written phonetically (or sometimes takes the form of new readings applied to existing kanji).

Yes Chinese characters (used in Japanese as kanji, which means Chinese character) often are composed of smaller elements or other characters. it common for a character to be composed of two common parts,one indicating meaning in some way,the other indicating pronunciation.

Someone made a video showing how this is the case for some characters:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FNvW19GbA

The entire character set is not that simple though.

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