The Japanese writing system uses three different character sets. Loan words are generally always written using one of these three sets, "katakana". Learning how to properly read and write Japanese will take years, but I highly encourage anyone visiting to at least learn how to read the 48 katakana (entirely phonetic). It's relatively low effort for the value it adds to your trip. Many of the Japanese loan words are of English origin, meaning you'll effectively be able to read some Japanese and understand it which can be very satisfying, useful, and hilarious.
I agree, I thought learning spoken phrases would be the way to go when I first visited, and it certainly helped with the basic stuff like restaurants and saying please/thankyou.
But knowing how to read the alphabets would have helped a lot more, because there are so many very understandable things sitting right infront of you if only you knew how to read the characters. コンビニエンス seems impenetrable if you don't know the alphabet, but it's just the adapted word for "Convenience": Konbiniensu.
Duolingo copped a lot of flack here in a recent thread, but it was great for initially learning the alphabets, it took nearly no time to memorize Katakana and Hiragana. If you don't know the alphabet you can't even begin to try and learn the language in situ, so that's step one and a huge help when travelling.
Minor nit: the kana are not alphabets, they're syllabaries. Each character represents a complete syllable (except ン/ん) as opposed to representing a consonant or vowel sound.
They are really straight-forward to learn as, unlike in English, they don't have di and trigraphs and extremely few pronunciation exceptions. Learning the characters can be done in an afternoon, though of course being able to read them quickly will take quite a bit of practice.
I tried to learn Japanese by sheer force of effort and managed to make "do-eet-su" stick in my mind to mean "German". It was years later that the penny dropped and i realized it was just "Deutsch" transliterated.
To stay within the food sphere, how about "kapsalon"[0] in Poland? Popular fast food created in the Netherlands in 2003. "kapsalon" is Dutch for "hairdressing salon". Etymologically, it can be tracked to a man who always asked for "the usual for the hair dresser".
Polish workers took the name home and it's now not an uncommon sight in Poland [1], amongst other places.
P.S. Don't eat it. It is disgustingly fat and unhealthy...
Nothing really disgusting about it, it’s just a pile of fries, meat, cheese and salad. Not much worse than the average Shawarma in healthiness, probably better.
My mind was blown when I realized the same had been done with the Japanese word "mamachari" — that is, a popular bicycle for women that allow them to carry a child and grocery bag.
And now we in the US have stupid restaurants like Poke Land which would be pocket land, but they thought it related to Pokémon. And it's just a shitty overpriced FoTM.
So now we have double-borrowed words. By the time it gets back to Japan it will be something like Land-Land and will mean something different again like monsters.
I don’t know the specific place you’re referring to, but at least all the restaurants I know of with Poke in the name are referring to Hawaiian Poke [1]. Although it’s influenced by Japanese cuisine, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon.
Reminds me of the sarariman I first read about in Neuromancer.
Loan words are interesting micro insight into culture.