This isn’t the first instance where I’ve had to fight against a situation like this. Ended up learning them in the same lesson. When I see one of them, my brain has such a tight association between the two that I always have to coinflip them “Is this theory or logic” and oftentimes I end up having to hone in on 1 of them, review just that 1 multiple times a day, for about a week, and ignore the other until the one I’m focusing has cemented itself. THEN I’m able to start picking the other one up now that the tight coupling is broken. This has occurred a handful of times within the first 20 levels, not always with flipped Kanji but also vocab made up of kanji with very similar meanings.
I think these should be separated by at least a level or 2, preferably more. It may not make as much sense to have them in a future level, but in terms of learnability, it will be far better.
Edit: For an example of the latter situation where this has also occurred for me, it’s usually a group of 3 Kanji, where 2 have a similar meaning and each pair with the 3rd to create a word. Instances of this I think would also be nice to have the two vocab words spaced out by a few levels.
There’s no best way, is the problem. Sometimes I don’t want them in close proximity so it’s not as confusing initially, but then sometimes when I learn the second one I intentionally have to put them side-by-side to figure out and internalize the difference. And I wonder if I should have just done that in the first place. Same with the visually-similar kanji.
I have at least once found myself missing one seemingly at random about half the time and cursing myself for not being able to remember it… then discovering I was thinking of two different, similar ones and not realizing it because they were introduced far apart in time.
Whenever I need to remember vocab like these I focus on listening and reading a few example sentences with the words in context. Despite having such similar kanji and readings on paper, they give off completely different vibes in use, especially when spoken. Once you see the words in the wild more and more it will be second nature. Had a bit of trouble when first learning 栄光 and 光栄 until I started taking this approach.
I just had these as well. These particular instances were quite easy for me because somehow it made sense that reason-theory = theory (theory behind the reason) and theory-reason = logic (what’s the reason behind the theory: logic!) =D if that makes any sense to anyone else.
Me, who kept failing my reviews to draw the second character in 比喩 (ひゆ）and 揶揄（やゆ） from memory and just found out today after weeks that they are two different characters.
Been a few months, tried a multitude of things and still haven’t been able to distinguish them consistently outside of coinflipping, at which point I purposely undo and mark wrong bc winning a coinflip =/= having actually known it.
It never comes up in my comprehensive input, but I would think that at the very least, the context would make it clear to me, so I’m not that worried about it, though I still wish an effort would be made to spread out these inverse vocab and other instances of two similar-meaning kanji being paired with a third.
Have you tried making a very simple mnemonic for them that makes it easy to remember which one is which? In the case of a pair like this you do not even need to make two, all you need is to cover one of them (the other will be the one that is not that).
理論 the reason for the theory is the theory
論理 the theory of the reason is logical
栄光 / 光栄
Honour before glory. When the (sun)light comes first it is honour, otherwise it is glory.
I was having trouble with some of these 論 words so I had to manually make mnemonics.
‘Ron’ was used for some other ろん mnemonic by wk, maybe the kanji mnemonic? So I added Ron to all of them.
For 理論 : The りろん theory says that we have to re り place all Rons ろん in the world. Replace them with what, exactly? I don’t know, you’ll have to come up with a new theory.
議論 : The giron ぎろん argument is a long standing argument between the gilded ぎ Rons. ろん What are they arguing about? Uh… I don’t know. Don’t ask me that. Just watch the gilded rons argue. See them sparkle.
