As the title says. There are plenty of words with multiple readings, but this Kanji comes up SO much, it’s almost always the Kun’yomi reading, and the Kun’yomi readings are so similar. I for the life of my can’t keep them straight about which one to use, で or だ. It’s gotten to the point it’s actually frustrating. I struggle so hard to reach guru with any vocab that has this Kanji in it. Does anyone have any tricks or suggestions?
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でる、だす
It really just comes down to using it or seeing it enough. But yeah…
Edit: To expand a little more, its just a really common set of words that you will 100% run into in the wild so sweating it now is silly. That’s all I am getting at.
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出 is used in a lot of common vocabulary. Maybe you just need to see these readings in the wild and build a deeper connection to them. This is always helpful for any items that doesn’t seem to stick when learning them I find. WK just lacks context for use in actual text and dialogue. But, you should be exposed to a lot by just starting to read manga or watch some anime, JP drama etc so that’s what I’d do to get a better feel for the words. 
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出る（でる）is “To Exit” because it’s the same で as 出口（でぐち）Exit.
出す（だす）is “To Take Out / To Put Out”.
Examples:
こうじがへやを出ました。
Koji left the room.
こうじがへやをでました
こうじがイスを出しました。
Koji took out the chair.
こうじがいすをだしました
Like people have said, these are very common words and particularly 出す will appear a lot in compound words and a wide variety of places so you’ll get lots of practice with them.
Bonus fact to help with だす
If you’re somewhat familiar with Japanese cuisine, you may know of dashi, the umami stock/broth used as a base for miso soup and a ton of different Japanese foods. In Japanese it’s written often as 出汁（だし）where the kanji literally mean “take out juice”. The origin is from nidashi 煮出し which means “to take out / extract flavor by boiling”. Basically you boil your ingredients to take the flavors out of them. Dashi is 出し juice.
Japanese article: 出汁/出し【だし】の名前の由来とは？｜名前の由来語源なら《ユライカ》
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Yes, this. The important thing is that there are two verbs which use this kanji. If you run into a use and aren’t sure which verb you’re dealing with, the biggest clue is that they have different okurigana, and none of their inflections overlap. So as long as you know how verb endings work then you can distinguish them. The secondary clue is that one is transitive and one is intransitive.
In compounds using the kunyomi assume で (e.g. 思い出, 日の出) unless there’s furigana pointing otherwise (e.g. 呼び出し). There are exceptions (especially if you’re reading old texts eventually), e.g for かしだし bith 貸出 and 貸し出し get EDICT’s ‘P’ tag for a ‘common’ word, but you can just deal with those as and when you get to them. (In that specific example it’s natural meaning-wise that it’s だす anyway.)
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the way i remember this is that 出す can’t be で because then it would be です and that’s obviously already taken, so it has to be だす instead. so if there’s a す or a し after it it’s probably だ
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What is です taken by?
uh, I mean there is no such thing as “being taken”, but です means to be and is probably one of the most common things youll see. I think they just mean that they know there is no overlap, so it can’t be that.
Thats basically how I sorted it in my head at the start too.
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In fact, most kanji with differing kun’yomi use the okurigana to tell you which reading you should use. 下がる is さ, 下る is くだ, 下りる is お, 下す is おろ and so forth.
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