Have you seen Chinese books before punctuations are the norm?
Readers in the past had to break up phrases and sentences, even paragraphs on their own.
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The same is true for the Greek and the Latin script.
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This happens in many languages, I believe. Like racehorse versus horserace. I bet you can find some in Russian as well.
In Japanese, the latter symbol gives the main meaning, the first symbol is the qualifier. 王女 is the woman (daughter) of the king, while the 女王 is the king who is a woman (the queen), and 本日 is the day that is current (today), while 日本 is the origin of the sun.
So, look at the last symbol 
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In general, but not always. Like 切手 and 勝手 both have nothing to do with 手, 水虫 is not a 虫, 大丈夫 is not a person 夫, 往生 and 先生 have thing to do with 生.
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Exceptions make a language beautiful.
Well, I’m not certain that your examples really are counterexamples if one looks at etymology.
切手 is an abbreviation for 切符手形, where 切符 means “note that is cut” and 手形 is “shape of hand”. The first refers to a ticket, which tends to be cut in order to be validated, and the second refers to the custom of making a stamp of ones hand to validate bills (and thus 手形 means bill). So although the etymology may not be clear on first sight, it does obey the rule that the latter symbol gives the main meaning.
勝手 originates from 弓道, or archery. Here the right hand is referred to as 勝手, and since the right hand is the hand that is used to pull the string, it is the hand that is free to move. From this the current meaning of “selfishness” is derived.
水虫 is relatively easy to guess: people thought that 水虫 was caused by insects in the water. I can find this etymology mentioned some places, at least, like here, or here.
大丈夫 literally refers to a large man. 丈 refers to the height of 1.7m, hence 丈夫 refers to a full-grown man. When introduced to Japan, it received its related meaning of “exceptionally strong man”, and this in turn became to mean only “exceptionally strong”, from which the current meaning “allright” can be derived.
往生 means death, but more literally it means “life that passes”, which even in English means the same as dying. It refers to being reborn (going to a new life), which fits with the idea of reincarnation from Buddhism.
For 先生, the original meaning of 先生 seems to be that of “elder”, rather than “teacher”. It’s not hard to see the connection with “earlier life”, i.e. someone who was born earlier.
Perhaps better examples that break the rule of the last symbol carrying the main meaning, are 当て字 where the characters refer to phonology instead of meaning. For example 寿司 meaning “sushi”, or 沢山 meaning “many”.
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It’s the same as components in Chinese characters were originally the whole word, and then combined with simple rules of one side to indicate the main meanings and the other to describe the component, and then evolved to one part to indicate the sounds with an associated component for related meaning, to complicated borrowing other words and indirect references, and much later just indicating completely different things when loan words were used or combined.
Japanese kanji utilizes the same principles, but at word levels when they introduced Chinese characters.
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A kingly woman can be either, but a female king cannot be a princess.
Seems like it does, pretty ironic I used that as the English example 
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講義 (こうぎ), basically commentaries and lecture notes written by teachers with details for students
the numbers are most likely how many tesuji problems solved correctly out of the total. And given a score out of 100 (点 is usually the unit for score). The first one is likely 108/150 = 0.72 (72% solved). 179/200 = 0.895 (rounding to 89% solved), and the last 138/150 (92% solved).
Overall, a very hard working student indeed.
For the second column, the first one is 瞬間英作文, a pretty typical Japanese practice to be able to spell and speak English words from Japanese quickly.
The last one is 全のフレーズ, all phrases. And TED might actually be TED talk videos (which usually have very good English subtitles and speakers from all over the worlds to practice English listening).
It’s label パパpapa, so it’s likely a simultaneous schedule for the father to practice English and for the daughter to practice Go.
And I think this tweet confirms it
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When you put it this way it sounds nice, it’s not about a kid who must study untill it falls asleep but about a family whose members like learning and support each other.
(I’m probably reading too much into it)
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講議 is Chinese with the same meaning, normally kanji in Japanese would use 講義 I think.
There are sometimes several different ways to pronounce a set of kanji, and the same pronunciation can also have different written kanji (it’s about the same situation with Chinese and probably even worse). It’s sort a mess mostly due to Japanese lose the tonal part of the Chinese characters combined with the “native” pronunciation prior to the loan word. A lot depends on when a word was borrowed in history.
And if they are whole sentences, things get even more complicated.
餃子, i.e. gyoza, or dumplings:
Lol wait thats the za in gyoza? Doesn’t that mean like “son” or “master” like in Confucious (kongja) and Laoze?
It means “child”. The etymology is Chinese, and apparently means something like “horn child”. I can’t really find why it’s called that… I guess the dumpling kind of looks like a horn or something?
子 is a suffix for Chinese. Most of the time, it doesn’t have meaning at all (sometimes it does, like in ancient time used as a courtesy name for gentry). And from my understanding it has to do when Chinese phrases and nouns started to evolve from single character to multiple characters, probably due to many loan words been introduced in the past.
It might also be a remanent tone indicator during the transition from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese.
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You are talking about Diminutive
Chinese has that, but 子 a suffix mostly has nothing to do with diminutive. In 種子, 種 already has the meaning of seed, the suffix has nothing to do with its size. It’s more of an indicator of a single noun, like 桌子 (table), 椅子(chair), 房子(house), 柱子(pole), 櫃子(cabinet), 箱子(box), 簾子(curtain), etc. The word in the front already has the full meaning, and can be used independently.
As a personal name (especially nickname), it can have a negative tone to it, like 狗子, 鬼子, 麻子, etc. I won’t translate them, but you will get the idea. It’s indicating someone is like that object. So 花子 is just someone like a flower (not always a good name though). In the past, it’s just people would use dignified words from part of the name of a gentry as a courtesy (老子, 荀子, 墨子, 孔子, 孟子).
There are cases where it is indicating as something’s offspring, like 瓜子 (Melon seeds), but used as fruit, again it might be just a suffix, like 桃子(peach), 李子(plum), or animals like 驢子(donkey), 蝦子(shrimp). Sometimes it means something of a personhood, like 男子 (man), 女子(female) becoming like adjective, 原子 is somewhat in this category, an anthropomorphism of something that is the basic unit (原 means the most fundamental, the starting point). Some in the reverse, and change adjective to noun like 量子 (quantum), A lot of the modern phrases borrowed old words with some close meanings and added the suffix to indicate some new foreign concepts without the use of loan words.
And some dialects use more suffix of 子 than other places, and like to put it in every phrases like part of the tone. That’s why I feel it could have something to do with the Old Chinese in the past evolved and merged to different regional languages (dialects in Chinese are more like different languages, even if they use the same set of written words, their pronunciations can be completely unintelligible)
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What about something completely abstract “點子” (idea), or part of a phrase “結樑子” (a feud). And size really doesn’t matter, like 碟子 and 盤子, they are both plates, but 碟子 is small plate, 盤子 is large plate. And point-like also isn’t the case, or 包子, 粽子, they are not small or even the same shape.
It’s not just about category either, like you can say 桌子(table), 椅子(chair), but not “床子”(bed is just 床), and 桌 (table), the sentence can be either 放在桌上 or 放在桌子上 (put on the table), it’s really a virtual extra suffix where 子 can be added or not. But 坐在椅子上 (sit on the chair) is correct, but 坐在椅上 is weird and most Chinese would tell you it’s wrong. While 睡在床上 (sleep on the bed) is correct, but 睡在床子上 is definitely wrong. And for loan words, like 沙發 (sofa), it’s certainly not ok to add 沙發子 in any case.
I hope this sufficiently confused anyone who don’t speak Chinese (the language family, not just mandarin).
Now, add these confusing rules and mixed them into more rules with a completely different grammar structure language like Japanese and blend them together. You can tell where the mess came from, even Japanese people have hard time dealing with kanji, where it’s a status symbol not long ago (less than 100 years) for people who can read kanji to be gentry.
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Learning Japanese by my new year resolution. Reading mostly a little daily, haven’t skipped a day.
Also found this RRTK Recognition Remembering The Kanji v2 - AnkiWeb nice deck, which is just what I think best available option: it has the benefits of MIA’s kanji deck combined with already made mnemonics.
I’m reading using Japanese.io .
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