While the waapuro-baka syndrome also exists in China, in Japan it's a lot more widespread than I thought.
Yea, the first girl that wrote
sentou (戦闘) as 戦"
糖" made me crack.
How can sugar have to do with battle?
Another thing that I suspect is that the Japanese don't learn the Kanji according to the meaning and logic, but according to pronunciation? Some of them use homophone kanji that have nothing to with the meaning.
Like "bribe"
wairo (賄賂) written as 絡路 (net-road) or 絡露(net-expose)? A Chinese would at least have guessed the 貝 radical which had to do with money.
Another reason may be that for more complex and less used kanji, they can always resort to hiragana, so learning to write those kanji by hand is not strictly necessarily.
Another reason may be that Japanese kana are harder than Chinese kana, they have so many different pronunciations and irregularities.
Another reason may be that some words are borrowed from Chinese. In Chinese many compounds make sense because they are formed according to Chinese logic, according to the Chinese meaning of each character.
E.g. Japanese 戦闘 comes from the Chinese 戰鬥. In Chinese 鬥 means "to fight", so it's a character that the Chinese know anyway and use in daily life, and not only as part of the word "battle".
Also, some characters in Chinese are are pronounced similar to their "phonetic part" (a part of the character). E.g. 賄賂 is hui lu. 賄 has a similar pronunciation with 有, while 賂 has a similar pronunciation with other hanzi that have the 各 part.
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