Which okuru are you talking about?
as for the rest, it's complicated .
する　vs　やる：http://www.guidetojapanese.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=40920
くれる　vs　もらう：http://www.guidetojapanese.org/favor.html

And there's even more to it than that .
Basically, lots of things will mean the same thing in English, but there will be fine differences in Japanese which are a bit hard to grasp at first. As time goes by and you add grammar, more knowledge of formality levels et co, you will get them. Tae Kim's guide is generally good for beginners, and textbooks will also cover these things. By the time you're done with the core deck you'll know about 10 different words for woman, but each will have their own use which you will have to figure out on your own (like woman, girl, lady, mistress are in English).

as for the keywords... many Heisig keywords are vague, limited or completely different from the actual usage of the Kanjis. The keywords are there to help you remember Kanjis and accustom you to their usage, they are by no means a dictionary. Just keep an open mind . The actual kanji which has "son" as a keyword will never be used for any meaning regarding son; there will be a few more kanjis with which this will happen, though it's definitely not the norm.

right..  I mean okiru (起きる）(eg. there was a major incident in town)　and 起こる (A burglary occured in my neighborhood).  those are the example sentences in core

about heisig keywords I find that they help me to remember how to write a vocab word if i remember the keyword sequence.. usually.. eg. hikouki is FLY, GO, MECHANISM.. what is the keyword for that character in 'son'?

So maybe I should work through a beginning text like genki..and build up, instead of burning through core 6000 with no context

Last edited by Miyumera (2012 August 30, 3:04 pm)

ooh.. I forgot about that.. I keep thinking you can only search by keyword.   Thanks and thanks for the links as well..

so okiru is for things happening in general? and okoru is for bad things?

Zgarbas wrote:

Depends on what you want to focus on, really. Focusing solely on vocab will not get you far, but focusing on grammar alone while ignoring vocab won't either. Just find a bit of balance and the rest'll work itself out .

I'm finding that if you know all the words in a sentence and have some basic grammar knowledge, you can probably figure out the sentence to some rough degree.  But if you know tons of grammar but don't know the words, you are out of luck in trying to figure the sentence out.  So to me, vocabulary seems to be the limiting factor.  I'm not too far into my studies so my perception may be wrong.

For the Kureru and Morau stuff, I recommend a book by Jay Rubin called "Making Sense of Japanese."  His explanation is the best I've read (and also talks about combining those words with the causative, etc.), and it's also just a great book in terms of readability, price, and advancing one's grasp on Japanese.

Wait wait, for the record, 起きる　and 起こる are both intransitive; they're not a transitive/intransitive pair (起こす is the transitive form for both).