Exactly what I use, including when I’m speaking Chinese. It works the same way.
@RalfKanjii An alternative breakdown: 理 is ‘reason’, but also ‘principle’. It’s something that brings order. 論 contains 言, which suggests it’s about talking: ‘arguing’, yes, but also about ‘discussion’. If you want a principle for arguments or discussions, then it has to be ‘logic’. If you’re discussing/arguing things in a reasoned/orderly manner, based on principles, then you’re looking at a ‘theory’.
I took a crack at this one before, but both Japanese and Chinese sources agree that the two words used to mean almost the same thing, and I’m not entirely convinced by my own explanation in that post. However, one of the old senses for 社会 in Chinese was ‘a festival organised on specific days to thank the village/earth god’, which might have helped make it seem more ‘social’ than 会社 when the Japanese author who popularised 社会 as ‘society’ was deciding which word to choose.
If I went with the nuances associated with 社 and 会 now, I’d say that 社 feels more like a complex, hierarchical organisation that functions as a single unit, whereas 会 is a more general kanji for meeting or coming together. To me, that makes 社会 a better fit for ‘society’, which is a much looser grouping of people, and 会社 a better fit for ‘company’. However, this is might be a chicken and egg thing, since the decision to use 社会 for ‘society’ probably influenced how each kanji is used. ‘What comes before modifies what comes after’ works very well in Chinese though, and it hasn’t failed me often in Japanese, at least in my limited experience so far, especially when kanji are involved.
Yeah, ultimately, I guess it’s about whatever helps someone remember a phrase. I like that ‘before modifies after’ rule, but if I can’t make it work, I’ll have to use something else, and some kanji compounds in Japanese and Chinese are so strange that even with such a rule, only familiarity will really allow one to remember them.
EDIT: In all fairness, I have some vague memories coming back to me of wondering what in the world the difference between the words in certain ‘AB vs BA’ pairs in Chinese was, particularly 適合 and 合適 (which are both valid in Chinese), so yeah, the rule isn’t foolproof. It was pretty frustrating at times. In that specific case though, the answer was ‘the former is a verb, and the latter is an adjective’. That’s something probably best learnt with a monolingual dictionary and assimilated through usage, which would probably be the sort of ‘hammering in’ you mentioned.