Exactly. Recently got into the song セプテンバーさん by RADWIMPS on youtube, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what that was supposed to be, though I could read and pronounce it. Turned to Jisho to find out it’s September
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When in doubt, say it out loud. And maybe more than once. Eventually your brain will realize the sound is very similar to another word you already know.
Seputenbaa / Septenbaa (don’t forget that in Japanese you usually skips the “u” sound, just like you don’t say desU you say des, not onegaishimasU but onegaishimas, and so on)
While you may not understand the meaning when reading it, you almost certainly will when saying it out loud.
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I know about skipping the U sound, but in the song you actually the u quite clearly, haha. I would definitely pronounce it less, because I know the englsh pronunciation. But when Japanese write/read stuff in Katakana they very often move away from foreign pronunciation. For example, you might know ランドセル, the backpack kids use in Japan? derived from Dutch ‘ransel’. This might be because the word has been in the language for a long time, so has had a lot of time to diverge from original pronunciation (also a lack of direct contact with the Dutch language, where the word isn’t even in common use anymore). Same with other loanwords, where either the meaning or pronunciation diverges to better fit the Japanese language.
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To be fair, you don’t really skip the “u” sound, you just pronounce it very softly or subtly or weirdly. You get a feel for it after a while, but for the sake of simplicity, you might as well describe it as “skipping” it. It’s much easier for beginners and not entirely wrong.
However, sometimes you really want to accentuate that “u”, and just as it is with anything else, you’ll get a feel for it after being exposed to the language for some time. Even so, you will get it wrong every now and then.
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