Hey Guys,

I'm having a hard time distincting these two kanji in my head because I think the keywords mean exactly the same. (I'm not a native english speaker, but I'm quite sure they both mean the same)

Does anyone know what the difference between these kanji is? (Or does anyone have a trick)

A tip is I think of intestines as something digesting the food, while entrails are used for divination like here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex

I don't know how it is in Japanese.

Hey Fakura,

You could add Japanese keywords to those cards to help distinguish them. I guess this is what most people do.

Alternatively you could try to utilize some sort of word play. This often worked for me when I ran into these problems while doing RtK. I don't think the particular word plays I used will necessarily be effective for you, but you might be able to come up with some of your own. Just to clarify what I mean I'll provide two examples of the kind of things I did when I ran into keywords I would often confuse with each other:

Intestines/entrails: I focused on the "tra" part of "entrails", since this also happens to be the first three letters in the word "trade". Thinking of the storehouse as a place where one could trade slaves (a primitive in the "storehouse" kanji, which again appears as a primitive in "entrails") made it easy to tell them apart.

Admonish/chastise: Admonish starts with an "a" and so does "awe" which appears as a primitive in "admonish". After I made that connection I completely stopped confusing those two.

What I do is I look up the words using these kanji.

Compare:

http://jisho.org/words?jap=*%E8%85%B8*&eng=&dict=edict
http://jisho.org/words?jap=*%E8%87%93*&eng=&dict=edict

腸 seems to be more for the intestinal track = (large/small intestine, caecum, appendix), and 臓 for the viscera = (liver, lungs, heart, kidney and spleen)

I'd say that they're pretty much the same. However, entrails has a more general sense basically 'insides/guts' which can be intestines (mainly) and possibly parts of other organs spilled out through butchering or road kill lol... 'intestines' is more specific.

I picture entrails as gruesome guts separated from the body, whereas intestines are intact and healthy in the body, for kanji sake.

They're not pretty much the same. 腸 refers specifically to intestines - large, small, and "blind" (appendix), while 臓 refers to internal organs of all kinds, and is used as a suffix on the names of several internal organs - 心臓 (heart), 肝臓 (liver), 腎臓 (kidney).

Ah thanks a lot guys, this will help me out quite good.
The "tra" from trade thing is already helping me separate both kanji, and the Jisho website is also very nice. (Should've thought about something like that)

Thanks!