Does anyone know of a good resource for learning the different nuances of words that can be written with different kanji, with nearly the same meaning? Ex. 在る／有る, 良い／好い／善い, 捜す／探す, and so on. There seems to be some of this in my 電子辞書, but not nearly enough.

Also, my relative ignorance of 擬声語 and 擬態語 is turning into a problem. Does anyone know where I can find a list of the more common ones, and just how do you make works like that stick, anyway?

Kanjigen usually includes a section on this. It's not a big section, but it's very simple to understand.

also, both Windows and OS X official IMEs have this kind of information included when you write kanji.

As for Onomatopoeia, I feel a book called 語彙力ぐんぐん１日１０分 to be quite good. It costs 800 yen and let's you train (among other things) such vocabulary.

mimetic words: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=r...B8xw&hl=en

i recommend looking at these: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=2326

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid43560

you put them in Anki and review to make them stick

hknamida Wrote:Does anyone know of a good resource for learning the different nuances of words that can be written with different kanji, with nearly the same meaning? Ex. 在る／有る, 良い／好い／善い, 捜す／探す, and so on. There seems to be some of this in my 電子辞書, but not nearly enough.

　Check the dictionaries at http://dic.yahoo.co.jp

Also, you can always look up something like "word1 word2 使い分け" or "word1 word2 違い"　using your favorite search engine.

Thanks~