Japanese takes exactly this sort of 'embrace and extend' approach to building on top of the Chinese character base, with hiragana for native construction, katak

Japanese takes exactly this sort of 'embrace and extend' approach to building on top of the Chinese character base, with hiragana for native construction, katakana for foreign loanwords, and furigana (more of an orthographical sugar than a separate symbol set) to bridge the systems for the sake of easier learning..