I’m having issues with telling some vocab apart. No matter how many times I look back over it, I still forget. I’ll get it right one day and wrong the next.
They are:
見返す
見返る
見直す
And I think there is one more like these.
Can anyone please offer some advice on how to go about memorising these?
Some specific advice: 見返す and 見返る differ essentially in the same way as 返す and 返る – one is transitive and the other is intransitive. (And -su verbs are always the transitive verb in a pair.)
General advice: strategy one is to study all the confusing words together to make sure you’re clear on the differences and which is which. Strategy two is not to study them together: instead put one of them to one side and stop trying to learn it until you have the first one down solidly. If one strategy doesn’t work, try the other
Looking them up in a monolingual dictionary can give you a better idea of how they’re similar and how they differ than English glosses do, even if you don’t understand everything yet. Seeing how they’re used in a sentence can also help. Learning words in a vacuum is usually harder than with context
With transivity pairs like 見返る/見返す, you may have to come up with a mnemonic to remember which is which. There aren’t really any absolute rules about transivity, but I think with る/す pairs at least, the す verb should always be transitive