I worked with a guy once who had served at a U.S. Navy base in Japan. He made an interesting observation: as an English-speaking person, if you live in a country where they use the Roman alphabet, you can remember the words you see on streets signs and so forth even if you can’t pronounce them and don’t know what they mean. But in Japan if you’re lost the street signs are of a lot less help because we aren’t used to the characters we see.