> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni. Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store > Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters. This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice". 米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)