Kind of, I could think of a few examples in english:

outlook : look out

Overlook : look over

Overtake : Takeover

Upkeep : Keep up

There might be others that I can’t remember right now. I don’t know if for you most of these are cheating since they become two words instead of just being one.

In Portuguese, I really can’t remember any examples

French has verlan, a slang in which words are reversed in a similar way, so that we say them differently, but they mean the same thing. “louche” means “suspicious”, but is often said as “chelou”.

It’s not the same effect, but a similar structural pattern.

It’s not even always swapping syllables. Some people say “meuf” as slang for “femme”, even though the word has only one syllable.

I’m not a French speaker from birth, so I don’t know how common this slang is. I know we find it near Paris.

You can hear it in the TV series HPI, where the lead character uses it quite often and the show is set in Lille, which is about 200 km from Paris.

English? Yes.

If we apply strict rules that both parts have to be directly linked, i.e. no space, I suspect English will have fewer examples of this. Because it doesn’t always write combos without a space. Lighthouse vs. house light, but horserace vs. racehorse. I think the “proper” Germanic languages, i.e. unencumbered by Norman invasion, will probably have more.

German has shit like:

Fußballverein (football club) and Vereinsfußball (football organized in clubs, differs by one letter). Hausboot (houseboat) and Bootshaus (again an extra s). Turnhalle (school gymnasium) and Hallenturnen (indoor gym class, annoyingly an extra n this time), etc.

In English, the example I would proffer is “attorney general”, which as-written refers to the chief lawyer that advises a state (sometimes exceedingly badly). But if reversed, “general attorney” could plausibly refer to a lawyer that can take on any type of legal work, not self-limited to ones within a particular specialty (eg divorce law, personal injury, copyright, etc).

This is in the realm of postnominal adjectives, although not all reversals will yield recognizable phrases, and some will be nonsensical, like “the incarnate devil”.

I have a suspicion that the closest that English gets to the Japanese kanji-switch might be in technical writing, specifically for the name for pharmaceuticals. Such names are often order-specific, because they draw from the chemical structure of a molecule. From the minimal Japanese that I know – thanks anime! – I’m aware that the word for “carbon monoxide” is composed of one carbon and one oxygen. But if I were a chemist or pharmacist, I might recognize the root components in the names “paracetamol” and “acetaminophen”, which are the same thing.

Kind of in German? Because the last “word”-part in the word determines what it really is and the separate parts of the word stay with the same meaning most of the time, so the end result is often connected to the meanings of the word parts it is made up of.

As example:

Fahr = driving-related
Fahrt = the drive
Plan = map, plan
Bus = … bus

Fahrplan = timetable for trains, busses etc
Planfahrt = drive that is according to some plan (instead of outside of the planned timetable)
Busfahrplan = timetable for busses

I’m going to go with: foot/toof or feet/teef. Good anadromes that also stand at opposite ends of the body. Except for the scientific units (eg, ohm/mho), they seem to generally be unrelated words more by chance than intent.

Czech has interní (internal; mostly in professional settings) and niterní (core, inner; mostly psychological, spiritual), both of which are synonyms to vnitřní (internal; general use) in their own ways. It’s a coincidence, the etymologies are completely different.

I think it sometimes works for technical terms.

The one that comes to mind is microphotography (taking very small photographs) and photomicrography (taking photos of very small things)

Similarly, historical cartography is maps of history, while cartographic history is the history of maps.

There’s “honey bee” if you want to specify that you’re talking about the type of bees that produce honey, and there’s “bee honey” for the honey they produce, as opposed to the kind made by wasps.

I can’t think of things in English that are very similar. There might be some compound words that happen to be usable both ways (eg overtake, takeover), but I’d call those mostly coincidental.