Transliteration is how languages adopt words from other languages using their own characters. For example, Taiwan, Taipei, lo mein, won ton, and ramen are all transliterations from Asian languages.
In other words, nobody wanted to create a new English word for them, so we stole the words and used the ABCs to spell it. They do the same thing in Chinese.
copy and paste the following Chinese words (one at a time) into Google translate, set the translation from Chinese to Chinese (so you don't cheat!), click "Listen" underneath the text box, and see if you can guess the meaning!
歐巴馬
培根
起司
沙拉
沙發
澳大利亞
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