Question in the title. Like for example why スカート uses a “ー” or not ”スカット” . Was wondering if there was a way to tell the difference of when and why they’re used for certain words. Or is it just a word by word basis, just straight up remembering vocabulary.
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Because those are completely unrelated.
ー is a vowel extender, not a variant of っ.
An important distinction, since スカート, which can alternatively be (but almost never is) written as スカアト, is *not* スカット
It’s probably going to be on a word-by-word basis, but I think English words with an ‘r’ after a vowel tend to get long vowels rather than gemination – since skirt has an r it’s スカート; compare that to scat which is スキャット.
ー is for extending vowels sounds
ッ is for hard consonants
If you don’t natively speak a language where vowel length differentiate words, the difference between ー and っ might sound similar to you but they’re very different sounds to Japanese speakers. It sounds like you just need some more practice to be able to hear the difference that these two make phonetically.
ー makes the vowel before it double the length. ハート= haato
っ makes the following consonant a double consonant, essentially making a short pause to prepare the next consonant. ハット = hatto
The line extends the vowel sound that comes before it; the ‘tsu’ doubles up the consonant sound that comes after it. In your example, it’s the difference between “sukaato” and “sukatto”