I find the different ways that Chinese and Japanese deal with loan words to be pretty interesting!
One idiosyncrasy of the Chinese written language is that since all its characters are ideograms that convey meaning, it doesn’t really have a phonetic alphabet. Compare this with Japanese, which has the purely phonetic kana at its disposal when writing foreign words.
I would guess that this is one reason for Chinese not having that many straight loan words, instead choosing to translate the words, while Japanese often loans the words as-is.
For example, skateboard, game and tennis are just スケートボード (sukeetoboodo), ゲーム (game) and テニス (tenisu) in Japanese, while in Chinese they are 滑板 (huaban, lit. slide board), 遊戲 (youxi, lit. play-game), 網球 (wangqiu. lit. net ball).
(Looking at the Chinese skateboard wikipedia page I also happened to see that the ollie trick is called 豚跳 which literally means pig jump. I have no idea how to read the characters, but they mean the same thing in Japanese…)
Japanese does of course sometimes do this as well. For instance, baseball is called 野球 (yakyuu, lit. field ball) in Japanse.
Some old loan words in Japanese can also be written with kanji, but still take their pronunciation from the original word. The two such words I know are tobacco, 煙草 (tabako, lit. smoke grass) and glass, 硝子 (garasu, lit. salpeter child, though 子 is often used like this to denote particles or similar).
Both of these words are from languages other than English, (tobacco being Portuguese and glass being Dutch), since before America becoming such a major influence, these were the western trade powers that Japan interacted with.
Chinese does also sometimes just loan the words, pronunciation and all, in which case characters with a similar pronunciation is used. Such words include guitar, 吉他 (jita). The characters here mean “he” and “lucky” respectively, so they’re obviously used solely for their pronunciation.
Googling, I found this table of characters used when transliterating into Chinese. Though it seems to me like according to this system guitar should be written 吉塔 (jita) with the last character meaning “tower”.
As a final observation, I think it’s also interesting how Japanese seems very open to loan words in general. In fact, a lot of the most common words in Japanese are loan words.
These include words like door, ドア (doa, from English), table テーブル (teeburu, from English) and bread パン (pan, from Portuguese).
It might seem strange that such common words aren’t native ones, but one reason for this is that these specifically refer to the western-style doors and tables, and were imported along with the objects they refer to.
Adventures in Language Self-Study 