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

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

Last edited by LazyNomad (2010 June 23, 12:16 am)

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.

Last edited by LazyNomad (2010 June 23, 3:18 am)

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.

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.