chapotraphouse

This is one of the things I love about languages written with Chinese characters: yes, it's a pain in the ass to learn thousands of characters, but once you've achieved basic literacy (i.e. high school graduate level) you can successfully guess the meaning of a lot of technical terms that are impenetrable in English.

Take petechial hemorrhage. It's a term that I'm sure is familiar to anyone who's watched enough crime procedurals (since it's present in victims of strangulation) referring to a characteristic pattern of tiny spots of bleeding under the skin. Hemorrhage is a word that I imagine many (most?) high school graduates would recognize, especially since it's also used metaphorically in a less formal way, but the etymology uses two roots (for "blood" and "burst") that are rare outside of other specialized medical/scientific terminology, so if you didn't know what it meant already you're pretty much screwed. But petechial is only used in specialized medical contexts and again, is completely impenetrable without knowing Latin or Italian (perhaps other Romance languages?).

The equivalent term in Japanese is {点状|てんじょう }{出血|しゅっけつ } (tenjou-shukketsu). Technical terms like this are often formed of two-character compounds, and this is no exception. The second half, {出血|しゅっけつ }, is literally just the everyday term for "bleeding" so even a child would know it, but if you wanted to break it down it consists of 出 ("exit; go out") and 血 ("blood")—dead simple. The first half, like petechial, is not an everyday word, but unlike petechial we can easily get a sense of what it means. {点状|てんじょう } consists of 点 ("spot; point") and 状 ("condition; status). So altogether, the word is "[spot-condition]-bleeding." That gives you a pretty decent sense of what the word means, and all the kanji are simple enough that a fifth grader could read it and make the same inferences. Meanwhile, you could show a PhD the word petechial and unless they're in medicine or have a strong Latin background, they'd have no hope.

That's not to say that all technical terms are this simple—far from it—but even when they use more exotic and/or complicated characters you can often still get a sense of their meaning by looking at the components that make up unfamiliar characters to get broader semantic and phonetic clues.

They're a fundamental category of acid if I'm reading this right.