I have just started with WK, but I’ve found a mnemonic that sounds wrong to me.
For me, the hard part about 八つ and 四つ is remembering which is や and which is よ.
So I was surprised when the mnemonic for やっつ was “yacht.” Isn’t yacht pronounced よcht? In fact, in Japanese it becomes ヨット. Is this mnemonic simply based on the written form of the word? Or is it an issue of American vs. British English? (I’m not a native speaker, so maybe that’s why I’m confused by this.)
In any case, I decided to dump the pre-made mnemonic and just remember that 八→８→はち→やっつ、while 四→４→よん→よっつ。
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I thought I’d mention it.
It’s not aiming for the Japanese pronunciation, but the English, and even then it is not meant to sound exactly the same, but just to serve as a reminder of the sound.
In most (?) N American pronunciations, the ‘ya’ is somewhere between や and よ.
And the mnemonic is yachts not yacht, so it gets the beginning of the つ in there, too.
Yeah, it’s closer than some other mnemonics are. The creators accommodate British spelling when they can, but if you’re making a pronunciation-based mnemonic, there are just always going to be conflicts, given the number of English dialects.
