"It's because English has no (or very few - I can't think of any) words that begin with the same phoneme."

True, but I reckon it's more than that—read my reply to numpad0.

"Japanese loaned "Arbeit" (アルバイト) from German and they also pronounce it "wrong"."

Question: is that because of structural diffences between the languages (as I mentioned above) that make some foreign phonemes difficult to pronounce? If so, that's different to English speakers who can pronounce Tsu.