Well, this at least made me finally look up the reason why KARAOKE (a Japanese word) is written in Japanese using Katakana (glyphs almost exclusively reserved for the vast number of foreign [mostly English] words Japanese has subsumed):
tl;dr: kara is a glyph which translates as "empty", but the oke comes from subsuming the English word ORCHESTRA - so karaoke is only half Japanese and therefore it is written using the system for foreign words.
It does seem like actually knowing the target language is a major (unfair?) advantage - I couldn't make sense of any of these except for that one, because I can read Japanese, and that made it trivial.
That's true. If you knew all of those languages (and obviously several of them were incredibly obscure) you could fly through the challenges in seconds.
https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E...
tl;dr: kara is a glyph which translates as "empty", but the oke comes from subsuming the English word ORCHESTRA - so karaoke is only half Japanese and therefore it is written using the system for foreign words.