[brobinson]

Close, it's "soriddo" (ソリッド).

English loan words in Japanese are so fascinating to me. Here's an example: "limited slip differential" -> リミテッド・スリップ・デフ (rimiteddo surippu defu)

(The ・ is used to separate foreign words/names when a Japanese speaker would not be able to figure it out)

This must be how Romance-language speakers feel when they see their words modified and incorporated into English.

If you want to learn the Katakana syllabary, try this website I found recently: http://katakana.training

There's also http://hiragana.training for the other syllabary.

[Natsu]

Yes, it's surprising how many things you can figure out just by being able to read hiragana and katakana. Though there are a lot of things that tend to be anomalous, like the insertion of small tsu characters in places an English speaker would not imagine a glottal stop, even assuming an English speaker who even knows what that is.

Sometimes it really takes imagination. I have a family member who has an arcade game labeled "Hangly Man" (a Pac-Man clone). It took quite a while for it to dawn on me to reverse that back to kana (HANGURI) and figure out that it was meant to be "Hungry Man."

[brobinson]

>"Hangly Man"

That is quite amusing! I think the hardest word I've found for Koreans and Japanese to say is "parallel".