As an English speaker who once spoke a little Loglan (the 1978 dialect!), I think you're mistaken. Knowing "blue" definitely helps in remembering "blanu". Occ

As an English speaker who once spoke a little Loglan (the 1978 dialect!), I think you're mistaken. Knowing "blue" definitely helps in remembering "blanu". Occasionally there was a word that didn't take a lot of its phonemes from English, and those were definitely harder to learn. Obviously the benefit is going to be smaller if you don't speak one of the major source languages, but it still seems like a reasonable strategy to me for selecting vocabulary in an artificial language.