Quote Originally Posted by Kawaii Ryűkishi
Quote Originally Posted by Aralith
roomaji (the Arabic letter representations of Japansese hiragana and katakana)
You mean Roman letters. The word "romaji" itself is an abridgment of "Roman ji," where ji means characters.
Unfortunately, the Japanese katakana has not yet come up with a symbol to represent the "th" sound (and probably never will because the Japanese people can't pronounce it anyways)
They're perfectly capable of doing so. It's just not intuitive. Same deal with English-speaking people trying to roll their Rs.
Your first point is very true. I just realized my mistake. I was thinking Arabic numbers being the ones we use, instead of Roman letters (don't ask me why, I can just get stupid sometimes). But I'm pretty sure they can't say "th". I've met several Japanese people, and one of me and my friends favorite things to do was to purposely tell them to say English words that we knew they couldn't pronounce. At least not correctly. It was pretty funny, but one of the words we would always tell Shige to say was earth. He always pronounced it aas (which is strikingly close to the actualy katakana pronunciation aasu). The same way they can't pronounce "v" and so use "b" as a substitution (yet they for some reason have a v-dan in their katakana which is never used. Never understood the point of that, but whatever).