> 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.

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".