This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that "damage" and "destroy" are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with "damage" and some such as military affairs and one's thought or belief more with "destroy." In addition, the core meaning of "damage" gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while "destroy" offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because "destroy" is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than "damage." The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.