Foreign Words and Katakana

[reboundstudent]

(Maybe this already exists as a topic on the board, and if so please redirect me...)

I ran into this problem on this very board... Every dictionary I've looked up doesn't have a way to write "podcast." Obviously, if you do not know a word you should look it up, but is there a rule to writing foreign words in katakana?

[johnpa]

J-Edict has it spelled as ポッドキャスト.
The only rule I know of is, go by the sound of the word rather than it's native spelling. But I would have never guessed there's a ッド　in there.

[QuackingShoe]

It's ポッドキャスト. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi- ... dic.cgi?1C generally has stuff.

There are generalities but you can't really make hard and fast rules when it comes to importing foreign sounds that you're trying to keep phonetic. But, they DO try to keep it phonetic, so once you get used to the Japanese ear you can guess what the katakanization of a word is a good percentage of the time. For example, 'pod' to　ポッド is pretty straightforward if you're familiar with the process. 'cast' to キャスト might be confusing at first, but they consider our 'ca' sound to be closer to キャ than to カ (which is a fair assessment), so it usually ends up that way.
Anyway, you can't know without confirmation.