>there's a bunch of stuff that kind of looks like it would make sense when reading a Chinese word in Japanese, but turns out there's a lot of meanings are very different

As someone who knows nothing of the Japanese language beyond the very basics, I found these videos quite entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E6vHCT0wpw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzJqXd-1dEU

It looks like many characters are familiar to his respondents, but their combinations make absolutely no sense.