Similarly I use 上 for ジョウ and not “Jourm” which I’m not even sure is a real name?
I personally changed it to “Joe” which makes much more sense, because it’s more common (which I prefer compared to being weird and obscure) and has the same sound.
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Not a native English speaker, but for me it also rhymes with “form”. Good point about mnemonics needing to rely on known word pronunciations. That would also be true for words pronounced similarly across accents, which WaniKani has a problem with, because it’s biased towards a specific group of accents.
While this is true, picking a phrase which is likely not to work for a lot of people due to a distorted pronunciation is a weird take 
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This is something I would like to work better in my kanji learning app. I am still collecting kanji, but going to start drafting sound overlaps soon at some point.
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Being a non-native English speaker this alone makes a huge chunk of the pronunciation mnemonics useless because they rely on a specific, often colloquial and distorted English accent.
That’s why I think it would make vastly more sense for WK to only use English-based mnemonics early on to bootstrap the process, then switch to using previous Japanese readings to introduce the new ones. I mean as we know, there are only so many distinct onyomi…
Some people make the argument that it’s a bad idea to start learning Japanese with roumaji and instead just learn hiragana immediately and use that, the idea being that using roumaji can induce you to use wrong pronunciation because you’ll unintentionally tend to apply English spelling rules and phonetics (or whatever your mother language is). I think that makes sense, but for the same reason I think that using English-based mnemonics is a great way to mess up your pronunciation and pick up bad habits.
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What I was thinking of (for the purpose of my app) is to use names or words with a fairly predictable pronunciation as hooks and later on Japanese-based mnemonics. Or perhaps even Japanese based mnemonics using animals to begin with so people have a common ground to start from and don’t have to imagine how Mrs Chou looks like.
I think roumaji is fine as long as one respects vowel length which despite being doable even in English, I see not being the case for 99% of the sources I come across. Which is a real shame. But in this case I blame English for actively distorting the pronunciation of every single non-English word (Tyrannosaurus Rex anyone?).
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Show me on this doll where the dinosaur touched you inappropriately 
“English” shoulders so much blame already (threw and through, for example) - a little more piling-on won’t hurt, though…
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WHO is Kouichi
WHAT is Kouichi
WHEN is Kouichi
WHERE is Kouichi
WHY is Kouichi
and most importantly
HOW is Kouichi?
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Check the pronunciation guides in a natural history museum 
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People out here asking if Jourm is a real name… guh…
… next think you’ll know they’ll be asking if Santa is real… or if they really should be giving ray/rei guns to ghosts…
There’s also “Jo” as a name mnemonic around there whch it’s too close to as well IMO
Good point about mnemonics needing to rely on known word pronunciations.
This reminds me of when I started with the kana sounds in Genki. It says that えい rhymes with ehh. That was not helpful, given the major confusion with えい pronounciation is whether it rhymes with the e sound in egg or the e sound in neigh. And ehh could use either, depending on what part of the world you’re from.
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Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of American websites explain that え is pronounced like “ay”. For example. And while I’ll grant that “sa-kay” is closer to the correct pronunciation of さけ than the usual English pronunciation of “sa-ki”, it’s… still not terribly close. Even in an American accent.
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I remember being taught the “ay” pronunciation back in the day! I think I lived in Japan over a year before I happened to look at a different beginner material that introduced it as, “eh” and it got me wondering. Even after that, I was so convinced it was “ay” and that I was hearing “ay” (even though I wasn’t) it took me a while to change. Later I became really crazy about Japanese phonetics, and I think being deceived on such a basic sound for so long is what made me really picky afterward on how each sound is actually pronounced.
Edit:
Checked your link, and laughed that they themselves had to give up on the “ay” pronunciation for です, writing it as “deh - su” when they teach the pronunciation.
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I always thought え was pronounced “ay” too until I realized while messing around with English phonetics that “ay” is a diphthong of “eh-ee”, then it clicked that that’s what えい is, and then I realized I had been pronouncing え wrong this whole time
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Stalin was a murderous asshole but banishing his name from memory is just going to make him more mysterious and attractive to future wannabe-autocrats
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Perhaps, but I’d hesitate to call the WaniKani mnemonic corpus “memory”. 
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I think it’s a problem with English. Other languages don’t have to utilize constants as fake stopping sounds. For instance, in my mother tongue え is just “e”. It’s a single sound. No need for ay, eh, ehh or other tricks resulting from English’s butchered phonetics .
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Sometimes えい is also just how a long-vowel ええ sound is written.
There seems to also be some debate over whether Japanese has diphthongs at all, which I definitely do not know enough linguistics to have an opinion on – I think the question is whether the sound moves gradually from one vowel quality to the other as opposed to being two different vowels one after the other. I found a stack exchange answer which suggests in passing
In modern Tokyo Japanese probably only /ai/, /oi/ and /ui/ are actual diphthongs.
W-wait - are you suggesting that Santa is not real?
Don’t worry, I already made a video proving that he does exist here: The Mathematical Proof of the Existence of Santa Claus - YouTube
I’ll see your proof and raise you a proof for the non-existence of Santa:
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eqsnw/mathematical_proof_that_santa_claus_doesnt_exist/
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