> And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?
The answer to all of these are the same as everyone else. It's not like Chinese people routinely read the old classics in the original, and even then they're literally taught Classical Chinese in school as a separate language, because it is. But other countries have scholars who study the old languages and also work to translate classics into modern language for wider use - I certainly can't read Greek but have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sitting on the bench next to me, translated into modern English.
Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.
For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.
> From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.
They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.
For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:
Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.
In hiragana:
ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。
The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji):
人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。
人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.
For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:
졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지
Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.
Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.
For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.
They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:
In hiragana: The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji): 人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version: