You obviously learn it by itself but as Chinese words are mostly a combination of 2 characters, you immediately also have to learn e.g. 可以 (can, may, be able to), 可能 (maybe), 可爱 (cute) etc.
So someone who's learning characters in order to get 90% coverage (or whatever) would not simply learn characters but learn actual words. Learning characters in isolation would not be that helpful, indeed.
When you don't know a word (i.e. a combination) but you know the individual characters it is much easier to learn the new word either by guessing or checking.
In context, the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess, for example. Even in English 'lovable' is a synonym of 'cute'.
To be honest this whole thread about 可愛い is more or less bonkers, because it's an ateji. The word's meaning doesn't derive from the characters, the characters got arbitrarily attached to an existing word because they were similar in sound and meaning.
As such, the whole thing is about as meaningful as talking about how easy it is to guess that 珈琲 means "coffee"...
In this case, though it does seem that the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning.
It seems that it is both an ateji and a jukujikun [1] because the word does not come from the characters but the characters do have the correct meaning.
[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#J...
Nearly every word involving the kanji 可 in Japanese has something to do with permission: impossible (不可能), possible (可能), permission (許可), approval (可決), etc.
That said, the kanji-centric view of the world is ineffective, and one primarily adopted by beginner learners who have not spent any significant amount of time studying words in Japanese. It is always better to just learn words.
Sure, didn't I say they were in my post?
The point was, in a discussion of how well X predicts Y, it's not very useful to examine a test case where Y came first and X was chosen post-hoc to match it.
No, quite the opposite actually ;)
I do take your point that using that word in the discussion above, which is about Japanese was not the best example. On the other hand, it is a good example in chinese.
(B) By arbitrary here I mean that there is no linguistic connection. "Arbitrarily chosen because they are similar" => "chosen for no reason other than their similarity".
In Chinese, it can be further compounded into many common phrases:
可悲(pathetic, 可+'sad')
可气(annoying/irritating, 可+'anger')
可怜(pitiful, 可+'pity')
可恨(resentful, 可+'hate')
What would be a more suitable example would be 可(ke)乐(le) in my opinion, in which case it means Coke in Chinese, it is a transliteration.
But it could also be 'a thing that can be easily loved'. Rr simply, 'pleasing'. For example, 可口 means tasty. So, 可爱 could be understood in both ways actually.
Have you ever been around non-native students of Japanese? This is the one word that is pretty much guaranteed to be known by all with an interest in anything remotely Japanese.
Your point is valid, but kawaii is perhaps not the right example.
Most non-native students of Japanese will almost always encounter that word in hiragana, katakana, or even Romaji--encountering that as a kanji is actually remarkably rare.
The fact that the kanji for kawaii is an ateji makes it one of those odd ducks.
Interestingly, it's very common for students of Chinese. The word 可爱 (kě'ài, "cute") is dirt-common, but it isn't native to Chinese -- it originates as a loan from Japanese.
This isn't clear to the Chinese themselves, who use 卡哇伊 (kǎwāyī) if they want to refer to the Japanese word.
There's another modern word for cute, 萌 méng, which is also a loan from Japanese, though I think popular awareness of it as a weird loanword is higher, since its literal meaning ("sprout") is so far removed from the concept "cute".
Which is the trend with native Japanese people too.