Manyogana
Figuring out how to write the Chinese character system to correctly fit the Japanese language was quite a difficult task, since there were such big differences between Chinese and Japanese. For example, Chinese has an SVO (subject-verb-object) word order (i.e. I eat sushi), while Japanese has an SOV word order (i.e. I sushi eat). Also, while Chinese morphemes, or the smallest meaningful part of a word, are usually monosyllabic, or having just one syllable, Japanese words often were polysyllabic, or having two or more syllables. Examples of this include 山, 魚, 中, 国, 人, 多, 速 and 見. In Mandarin Chinese, the most spoken Chinese dialect in the world, these morphemes are pronounced shān, yú, zhōng, guó, rén, duō, sù and kàn in that order, all of which are just one syllable. In the native Japanese pronunciation, however, these morphemes are pronounced yama, sakana, naka, kuni, hito, oo, haya and mi(ru). What makes all this more complicated is that the last three kanji are almost never written by themselves in Japanese, if at all, since they are usually used in adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.