Home Forums The Japanese Language Verbs – those 'you do', those 'you don't do', how to identify them?

This topic contains 4 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by  Joel 12 years, 4 months ago.

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  • #32330

    vanandrew
    Member

    That has to be the clumsiest topic title ever.

    I’ve noticed in the kanji section there is often a verb word for when you are doing the action and another for when you are not doing the action.
    To understand this better I’m looking for a pattern, or rule.

    A lot of those that ‘you do’ seem to end in _eru and those that ‘you do not do’ end in _aru (with exceptions of course!).

    Some examples:

    http://www.textfugu.com/kanji/%E4%B8%8A/#top
    http://www.textfugu.com/kanji/%E4%B8%8B/#top
    http://www.textfugu.com/kanji/%E6%AD%A2/#top

    Is this correct, the right way to look at it? Can it be defined better?

    (Sorry if this has been covered somewhere, but I haven’t seen it anywhere).

    • This topic was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by  vanandrew.
    #32332

    thisiskyle
    Member

    You are talking about transitive and intransitive verbs. There is a lesson covering them in Season 6.

    #32333

    vanandrew
    Member

    Thanks Kyle!

    #32364

    Anonymous

    I’ve noticed that transitive verbs tend to end in える and intransitive verbs with ある、る、う, etc. It does kind of seem like you could tell the difference with this, but I found one exception where やく(to burn something) is transitive and やける(something burns/is burned) is intransitive.

    #32372

    Joel
    Member

    Yeah, there’s no hard-and-fast rule, just like always. Generally, one of a transitive-intransitive pair will be a る-verb while the other is an う-verb (for example, 開ける and 開く) but there’s no consistency as to which way around they go, and sometimes both are the same type of verb (like 帰る/帰す).

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