Loanwords, or gairaigo, continue to capture the attention of teachers, researchers, and the general public. Yet how useful, really, are loanwords for Japanese learners of English? In this presentation I will reflect on a three-year project investigating the potential of loanwords for lexical inferencing. I will describe my findings from recent empirical studies investigating whether simply raising learners’ awareness of loanwords can increase the accuracy of their guesses about the meaning of unknown English words.