Well, I finished RTKana a while back but have just discovered the modern katakana (gwa, va and all that).

What's the best way to memorize them? Is there a good chart, website, learning method , etc.?

Are they common enough to be learned from context or rare enough such that they can just be figured out when needed?

Is their a general set of rules for their formation?

I've had some trouble with this, best thing to do is get audio/words that have common katakana/hiragana(if you want to do this). And just read it out-loud a few times to compare it to the audio,etc.
Go to smart.fm and do the things on there, that is a good site for vocab,etc.
If your using anki, you can download the plugin to download vocab/sentences of the site(and audio,image,etc).
That's a good way of doing.

Disclaimer: keep in mind that I don't get much native Japanese reading exposure nowadays (bout an hour or 2 of FF13 every 1-2 days is my reading exposure atm), and I'm still a beginner student myself.

I don't have any solid tips on "remembering" them. I think most of them are common enough that you will recognize them after enough exposure anyhow. That's how I learned most of them. I don't really pay attention too much to the hiragana stuff I read. I think the hiragana are so common that even the rather unusual-looking combinations will provide no problems when reading them somewhere, or remembering them. They don't for me anyhow. It also helps that I hardly ever see hiragana used for those really wacky foreign sounds/words that katakana is used for, which is what gives me the most trouble.

Katakana is a bit different imo. 90% of the katakana I see right now is from videogames, so a lot of those unusual ones (like va) come up pretty often. Reading them and recognizing them is easy enough. Once again, enough exposure really should take care of the memorization of them.

The only thing that stumps me is some of the pronunciation. Like, I know クレジットカード is credit card, but is it pronounced like kureditto kado or kurejitto kado? Another one that bothers me is ゼリー. Is it pronounced jeri or zeri? I go with kurejitto kado and jeri for now, because I have no clue. I know the v sound is pronounced like a b, which makes sense because they sound pretty much the same when spoken quickly (and because I hear it endlessly on FF13), but for instance; zeri doesn't really sound like jeri at all to me. I haven't heard a lot of those other weird katakana sounds much yet, so I've never been sure on how exactly they're pronounced.

The only book I have that briefly mentions foreign sounds like this doesn't really make any sense to me when it comes to pronunciation. It lists ディ as di and ジェ as je, so why change them around to ジ and ゼ？

tl;dr
I think they're common enough that enough time and exposure will make them easily remembered without much effort. Also, I hate katakana

I think it comes down to immersion for this one as well. Keep reading katakana-type words and you'll be set after a while.

Offshore Wrote:The only thing that stumps me is some of the pronunciation. Like, I know クレジットカード is credit card, but is it pronounced like kureditto kado or kurejitto kado? Another one that bothers me is ゼリー. Is it pronounced jeri or zeri? I go with kurejitto kado and jeri for now, because I have no clue.

Here are clues:
kurejitto kado
dzeri

Offshore Wrote:The only thing that stumps me is some of the pronunciation. Like, I know クレジットカード is credit card, but is it pronounced like kureditto kado or kurejitto kado? Another one that bothers me is ゼリー.

There's nothing confusing about this. ジ is pronounced /ji/ and ゼ is pronounced /ze/. End of story.

Quote:The only book I have that briefly mentions foreign sounds like this doesn't really make any sense to me when it comes to pronunciation. It lists ディ as di and ジェ as je, so why change them around to ジ and ゼ？

You've got it backwards. Most likely because the words クレジットカード and ゼリー were established before ディ and ジェ were in widespread use.

JimmySeal Wrote:There's nothing confusing about this. ジ is pronounced /ji/ and ゼ is pronounced /ze/. End of story.

There is still one point with these syllables　(regardless of katakana or hiragana).
For example, if ぜ is at the beginning of the word then it will be pronounced as /dze/, while in all other cases it is pronounced as /ze/.
Same holds for じ, with /dji/ sound at the begining of the word, and /ji/ sound elsewhere.

LazyNomad Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:There's nothing confusing about this. ジ is pronounced /ji/ and ゼ is pronounced /ze/. End of story.

There is still one point with these syllables　(regardless of katakana or hiragana).
For example, if ぜ is at the beginning of the word then it will be pronounced as /dze/, while in all other cases it is pronounced as /ze/.
Same holds for じ, with /dji/ sound at the begining of the word, and /ji/ sound elsewhere.

ji is always pronounced dji, ze is always pronounced dze. If you want to hear how "ji" would be pronounced without the d sound, ask a Swedish person to pronounce ji in Swedish, where j actually doesn't contain any d sound. There's no such sound in Japanese.

Tobberoth Wrote:ji is always pronounced dji, ze is always pronounced dze. If you want to hear how "ji" would be pronounced without the d sound, ask a Swedish person to pronounce ji in Swedish, where j actually doesn't contain any d sound. There's no such sound in Japanese.

I guess you just never paid attention to it, but there is a slight change in consonant sounds of ざ-じ-ず-ぜ-ぞ moras　depending on the position of syllable in the word.

LazyNomad Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:ji is always pronounced dji, ze is always pronounced dze. If you want to hear how "ji" would be pronounced without the d sound, ask a Swedish person to pronounce ji in Swedish, where j actually doesn't contain any d sound. There's no such sound in Japanese.

I guess you just never paid attention to it, but there is a slight change in consonant sounds of ざ-じ-ず-ぜ-ぞ moras　depending on the position of syllable in the word.

That's an allophone and not worth mentioning, it's true for most consonants in most positions.

I mean, would you tell a learner of English that there's a point with the consonant l just because it's slightly different in "leaf" and "feel"?

The key to getting the さしすせそ and ざじずぜぞ right is the placement of the tongue. It should be in the same place for all of these. That is, tongue tip behind lower front teeth. So じ isn't really the same as the 'ji' (at least not as I understand it in English). It's not produced the same way anyway. The English 'j' is made by placing the tongue tip on the little bump just above and behind the upper teeth, and the English 'd' is made by moving the tongue tip behind the upper teeth. For さしすせそ and ざじずぜぞ, the tongue tip should stay where it is behind the lower front teeth, and just voice it when you add tenten. The reason the consonant sound changes when you say し and じ is because the space through which the air flows becomes narrowed when you pull up the corners of your mouth to make the い adjective. Basically part of your tongue (but not the tip) will touch the aforementioned bump just above and behind the upper front teeth making it easier to say them more like a shi and ji respectively.

I am not sure what allophone is, and I admit that maybe the point we are talking about is not worth mentioning to the beginner learner, but at a more advanced level it is better to know that the thing exists, as this allows you to sound more natural in Japanese.