Exactly what is the difference between the two? They’re both listed as “singing”, and it’s not like there’s any major change in reading, either.
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Looking at dictionaries, they are the same [歌を歌うこと。また、その歌。]
This too… 【唱歌】 と 【歌唱】 はどう違いますか？ | HiNative
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Don’t forget 材木 and 木材
Those actually are different… (not sure exactly what your purpose was in mentioning them).
木材 is wood that has been cut down and collected in tree-form but hasn’t been processed much
材木 is wood that has been processed into things like boards and whatnot
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I see, thank you for the explanation!
So it’s kind of like with 王女 and 女王。
木材 is still more 木 than 材
材木 is already more 材 than 木
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And as for 唱歌 and 歌唱, it’s true that they both have the definition of 歌をうたうこと in them.
However, it’s worth noting that 唱歌 is associated with a genre of music that often is merely referred to as 唱歌. Probably more often than the usage of 歌をうたうこと. If you naively tell a Japanese person you like 唱歌, with the intent of expressing that you like singing, they will think you like this very old-fashioned style of Japanese music. It’s not like… an embarrassing thing to like… for instance, some very famous songs belong to that genre. But they’d be surprised for sure.
The same can’t be said for 歌唱, though it’s still a rather stiff word.
歌唱 is most likely to be used as a more difficult / formal / etc word for 歌.
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Oh, this is a great way to remember it! Thanks!
So far I thought that 材木 is literally timber (trees for wood), because that’s one of the translations in WaniKani, but looks like that’s not the case. Hmm should these translations then be a little more nuanced maybe?
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Both are technically timber and are defined using each other. However, there’s a difference in nuance, which is what Leebo covered, and I suppose it would be good if that were included in WK translations too. What I would like to point out though, is that 木 is a very broad word that can mean both ‘tree’ and ‘wood’, and so here, I’d say that ‘wood’ is the sense of 木 that we’re looking at.
Any method you use for remembering the difference is good as long as it works, and I can understand @trunklayer’s approach because WK probably taught you 木 as ‘tree’ (plus, ‘trunks’ are part of trees, yes? 
), but I’m just not sure if it fits what 木 really means here. This is how I tried to tackle the difference:
Since I see the second kanji as the main one, my way of looking at it is that 木材 is still wooden raw material, whereas 材木 is wood that’s ready to be used as building material. As for how I remember which one is more processed or ‘proper’, in a sense… I just remember that 材木座 is a fictional character’s surname. It’s apparently also the name of an actual place with a beach in Kanagawa, which actually inspired his name.
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