This may be a stretch and probably not what you’re looking for, but:

Essentially, that’s what Japanese did. Japanese and Chinese have nothing in common, yet when the Chinese writing system made it to Japan over 1000 years ago it was the only one they had. Initially, it was used only to write Chinese, but then it was developed into a system suitable to write Japanese via many intermediate steps and multiple parallel paths. Now, centuries later, Japanese has:

• some characters that are identical to (traditional) Chinese ones with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 大 (large) or 中 (centre)
• some characters whose written forms have been simplified from traditional Chinese but with the meanings being preserved, e.g. 国 (state) 売 (to sell)
• two sets of characters that are radically simplified/modified from their traditional forms and used only for their phonetic value (katakana and hiragana)
• some characters whose written forms are as in traditional Chinese but whose meanings have departed. The best example I could find was 豚 which means pig in Japanese but piglet in Chinese.

(Of course, some characters’ meanings departed in Chinese while they are still used in their original sense in Japanese like 湯 (hot water in Japanese and old Chinese; soup in modern Chinese; they shouldn’t be listed in a separate bullet point because they generally fit the first)

• compound words composed of more than one character with a meaning akin to the Chinese one

• compound words composed of more than one character with a completely different meaning (手紙 which in Japanese means letter (the one you send) but in Chinese is toilet paper)

• entirely newly created written compounds, often spelt with hiragana and kanji to better reproduce Japanese grammar

• new characters created by combining individual parts, e.g. 働 (to work) made from the individual symbols 人 (man, person) and 動 (to move); the former regularly becomes a ‘pole with a steep hat’ in compounds such as 休

As Japanese and Chinese are linguistically so different (Chinese can have closed syllables, it has tones, the vowel registers differ and more), the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters obviously differs substantially from their original at the time of borrowing. In general, most characters can be pronounced in two or more ways depending on their surrounding. These pronunciations are grouped into kun (have nothing to do with the Chinese original pronunciation; this is a Japanese word with a similar or identical meaning) and on (more or less loosely modelled on the Chinese pronunciation when the character was borrowed which may have happened more than once). However, even on pronunciations can be considered a simplification at best; a bastardisation of th original pronunciation may be more accurate.

Differences notwithstanding, I know one Chinese who claims to be able to get the basic gist of written Japanese and with some crude knowledge of Japanese I was able to grasp the meanings of some things written in Chinese on Taiwan recently. So a certain degree of intelligibility seems to be conserved.