User defined synonyms?

It started with the “stone” radical, because I’d constantly say “rock” and get it wrong. Now I’m struggling with daiyou-substitute, because I keep saying “replace.” Would it be fair to add a user defined synonym? Do you think it’s cheating? Am I (a non native English speaker) missing some profound difference between the meanings of these words? Thoughts?

No, I don’t think those are different enough that they really change the spirit of the meanings.

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Yay \o/ I’m not the only one using rock all the time :joy:

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I agree that I think they are close enough. I think the only thing to be careful about is the difference between substitution and substitute, or replace vs replacement.
Substitution/replace - is the action of substituting or replacing
Substitute/replacement - is the actual thing that is being substituted/replaced.

For rock and stone - I think it’s pretty interchangeable in English. “Stone” to me, may imply that it’s manmade, or used by humans, but … it also may not. haha

If you’re thinking of it as just the word and not the infinitive, either can be verbs (i.e. I think directly changing substitute to replace doesn’t change the part of speech necessarily)

Yes, you’re right - but I just thought I’d mention it… since there is 代用 (substitution) and 代わり (substitute). I didn’t look up the nuance of either of those words - but it seems like 代用 is the action of substituting whereas 代わり is the actual substitute.

Maybe I’m off-base, my point was to be careful :sweat_smile:

Actually I think I misread the post. I thought these were both about the radicals.

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