Is anyone, like I am, having trouble memorizing the kanji because English isn't their first language? For example: I keep messing up the kanji for 'admonish' and 'rebuke' because in my mind, there is so little difference between the meaning of both words.

Www://dictionary.com helps, but not enough.

Is anyone having the same problems? How are you dealing with them?

Hello landgenoot! There are several people from The Netherlands here, me included. You might find some posts in the "What's the best time to start Heisig?" thread interesting to read.

If you do not know a keyword or don't know its connotations you can look it up. I was surprised to hear even native English speakers look up a lot of words if only to get a clearer image of what it means. These are some nice online dictionaries I frequently use: Allwords.com and Answers.com. Answers.com has great Dutch translations, but also includes information from Wikipedia, which makes it slower to load.

The keywords you mentioned, admonish and rebuke, are near-synonymous. Learning the usage of the words will help you keeping them separate. Admonish means "to scold or tell someone off firmly but mildly", whereas rebuke means "to criticize or reprove sharply". This is also used in the story Heisig gives (butchers give you an image of a sharp/stern tone, along with other sharp attributes). I also think of admonish as something a police officer might do (the character is actually used in words like police). The usage seems to stem from the etymology of the words. According to Allwords.com rebuke comes from 14c French rebuker, from bucher to beat, strike, while admonish comes from 14c French amonester, which only means to warn.

With the two words you mention, I just came to associate the sound of the word rebuke very firmly with the butcher's image. With two words with similar meanings, but with very different sounds, that sometimes works for me. 'Rebuke' always reminds me a bit of the dutch word 'beuk' (beating heavily on something), and that's easily to associate with butchers.

I'm having more trouble with words that I use very often and thus sound natural. Lately, there was the nasty triplet of 'uncommon', 'unusual', and 'rare'. All of them rather close together in the book as well, so that they ended up in the same stacks. The only thing that helped was that uncommon and rare were both terms I remembered from my card collecting days, so that helped to single out unusual at least.