Maciamo, first off it was never my intention to make it sound like I knew more than you, I even explicitly stated I suspected the contrary.


For 早い and 速い, it's clear there is a different kanji, but if you start like this, you could also apply kanji to English words and some would have lots of different kanji. Just take a word like suject. Is that the subject of a sentence, a citizen, a topic... ? If English had kanji (it could still happen), it would increase dramatically the number of words, as every different meaning for a same word would be taken separately.
はい？！ Is this plan to apply kanji to English linked to the hybrid of English and Japanese that the Japanese will use 50 years from now? The Ultimate Language Exchange kind of thing?

Then you come with tonai 都内 which means "inside the city", not just inside. I guess the compound -nai would work though. Translate it as uchi if you want, that's still the same word (same kanji). So uchi(gawa) and soto(gawa) indeed work for the inside/outside part, sorry to have missed them. However uwabe means "in surface or in appearance", which is not quite the same as
I should have posted the kanji, I didn't mean to come up with 都内, I remembered the word 戸内 but mistook the pronunciation when I put it in romaji, should've been be konai, sorry 'bout that．
上辺 doesn't mean just "in surface or appearance" (not in my dictionary, which is all I have to go on,in fact it is also part of the definition for 'joumen'),and while I'm at it I'd like to add 外面 to the list.
With kamen and joumen I meant 下面 and 上面．

I realise most of these words are not often used, I was really just playing Devil's Advocate ( = trying to be awkward)

Soko does indeed mean bottom as in bottom of the ocean, but since this is a completely everyday use of the English word 'bottom' I don't see why it was out of place for me to mention it. In fact from your point about the bottom of the screen you could say something like "底 and 下 both become 'bottom' in English".

Anyway, just because 'underneath' and 'below' both translate to 下, and all the other examples, so what? Again I really don't see why this frustrates you so much. Does it really add to the expressiveness of English? I think it just makes our dictionaries bigger..

The one point I really wanted to make (before I got sidetracked by racking my brain for kanji compounds)
is that you will always have a greater affinity with a language you were raised with or ones that share a common root and be able to express yourself better in these languages.

Moyashi-san made a similar point:
Yes, some words seem missing but let's not forget that their are many phrases for situations that I can't even put together in English.
Exactly. Im sure there's a plethora (you can have that for your list too if you want, Maciamo) of such phrases that I, and most other learners of Japanese, have never come across. This is especially going to happen to people who favour the 'we say this in English so how do you say it in Japanese'approach.

This might explain the movie subtitling problem to an extent (where the Japanese is necessarily driven by what was said in English): the flow of the conversation/situation in the western film is very different from how a similar scene would play out in Japanese I think. The translator has to balance the problem of being faithful to the information in the dialogue and avoiding unnatural Japanese that would come from a too direct translation. This results in a conservative translation. I would imagine that if you had given a synopsis of the required scene to a Japanese screenwriter the results would have been very different from the original and also use much more imaginative Japanese than the translation.