中文問題

Actually in Japanese, 食べる (taberu) is just one type of word for of "eat".　食う (kuu) is another, (more informal/common?) word for eat, and I believe it can also be applied to "eating" abstract things like consuming time or defeating an enemy. I have no idea if it's used to informally mean "capture" in some context too, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.

But you're right, it differs from the modern Chinese 吃. Of course, since it drew its roots from an older form of Chinese it's not totally unrelated; 食用 in Chinese also means "to eat" for instance. Japanese kanji usually have Chinese origin, but sometimes Chinese characters have no Japanese equivalent kanji.

To me, Chinese was a great help when learning Japanese (I learnt in that order) since the kanji were all fairly readable. In fact it's the only thing gluing my terrible Japanese together, since it's like an instant boost of several hundred vocab items.

Not to say sometimes there's a huge difference between hanzi and kanji that makes very little sense: my favourite example is 泥棒 (Chinese ni2 bang4, Japanese dorobou). The meaning in each language is quite startling: "mud stick" versus "thief" (!).

Don't forget:

English: greengrocer

Chinese: 菜贩 (literally "vegetable vendor")

Japanese: 八百屋 (literally "house of eight hundred")

Seriously, what the heck, Japan?

My favourite example of Japanese-Chinese confusion is 手纸... 

One thing I'm curious about, when I see a Chinese character I don't know for the first time I can often guess how it's pronounced based on its phonetic part, something that I find greatly aids memorization (especially if I've heard the word before but do not yet know how to read it).

Does this carry over to Japanese as well? I'd imagine that the multitude of readings (either unique to Japanese or borrowed from China at different times with various pronunciations) would make that much harder.

I don't know about that, but as I said, the Japanese language blogs here always use 取　for take/capture. I have yet to see 食 or 吃 being used for that.

I believe an alternative Japanese word (not sure if it's obsolete or not) is 青物屋　(green object shop? even though 青 usually means blue? )

As you're probably aware, most Kanji have at least 2 readings; the On (Chinese-origin) reading and the Kun (Japanese) reading. I'm not aware of any correlation of Kun readings (however, that doesn't necessarily mean there isn't any), but don't know about On readings. I always thought you just had to know them. At least most Hanzi have only 1 reading. The character 向　has 1 On reading (from Chinese) and at least 9 different Kun readings. As far as I'm aware, you just need to know which one to use when, but I could be wrong. I believe that nouns (at least those that use more than 1 Kanji) generally use the On reading, whereas verbs normally use the/a kun reading, but again I could be wrong. So even if it does carry over to Japanese (if so, I imagine that would only apply to the On readings), yes it's much harder.

What exactly is a "greengrocer"?

Ok, so from the context I know it's a person/ store (is it only one of them or both?) that sells vegetables. But I've never seen those two words used together as an actual term for something.

Also, as far as I'm aware, "菜贩" in Chinese only refers to a person, while "八百屋" in Japanese can only refer to a place.

lol