How to remember correct form of things like ず/づ and じ/ぢ

Japanese Language Questions
1

I just hit level seven where you start having this problem. Everyplace I read says that post war there is phonetically zero difference. Is there a trick to remembering the correct form of these that anyone uses? It almost seems like it would only reallllly matter if I wanted to take jlpt or something.

Haven’t even had the words long enough to fail a review on this technicality yet, but I for sure see it coming and already find it making the words themselves more cumbersome to remember because I feel like I’m mentally focusing more on this than the actual kanji/reading/meaning pairing. (and trying to remember that I type it “di/du” makes me almost go to remembering it phonetically with the d sound).

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2

Almost always the characters ず and じ are used. The few exceptions are primarily because of rendaku, i.e. a word like blood・ち・血 is in the word nosebleed・はなぢ・鼻血. If you know the original word is ち then that can help you remember the correct spelling in “nosebleed.”
In general, ぢ is so rare, it tends to stand out when you actually have to use it.
づ is slightly more common, but still pretty rare and I’m guessing it’ll pretty naturally stand out to you in another month.

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3

That makes me feel better, thank you!

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4

There is also a nifty script that gives you rendaku information on each item. :slight_smile:

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5

This one’s also often due to rendaku, although 続く.

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6

And on the other side of things, there’s always 縮まる ( ＾∀＾)

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7

:thinking: You need it if you want to type the word.

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8

There are cases that both Rendaku and homophone versions are accepted in the IME, like 融通(ゆうずう),   相槌(あいづち),   切(き)れ痔(じ) and 鼻血(はなぢ).

There are even cases that Rendaku version got obsoleted, but I can’t just recall these ones.

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