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.

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.

Last edited by Miyumera (2012 September 09, 9:55 am)

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!