Issues With Similar Looking/Meaning Vocab

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 :slight_smile:

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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

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