re: #253 A hollow voice says, Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Maybe in part, but I recall at least one westerner saying the same thing. And I suspect mainland Chinese who had such issues might keep them to themselves. (It’s not exactly a burning issue.)

Japanese counts Latin letters (“romaji”) as a fourth script, along with kanji, hiragana and katakana. And yes, you see romaji used in place names and the names of some businesses. However, if you’re studying Japanese, the advice is to stop using romaji as soon as possible and learn hiragana and katakana, which are syllabaries for (respectively) Japanese words and loan words (and onomatopoeia). But you also have to learn kanji because the number of sounds available in Japanese is limited. I learned several kanji last week that have the same sound (“kou”) as their pronunciation, but their meanings (and kanji) are completely different: go, sunlight, mix and think.

PS “kintama” (金玉) is a crass way of saying “testicles” in Japanese. It means “gold balls”. I learned it as part of vocabulary for “kin” (金 gold) and “tama” (玉 ball), but it is for sure not a word you want to use in polite company.