I am not saying its wrong. It defo is common spoken japanese. But on the other hand i have two native japanese grammar nazis close to me who correct my every transitive usage of 終わる.
Also apparently when you use 終わる it makes you sound working class apparently
They would correct これで話を終わります to what? And they would correct other natives’ usage of it?
If that’s the case, they sound like the kind of people that get in fights over the word “literally”. Not really a good use of time.
i think in the end its important to know that 終わる is used both ways. but that technically its informal to use 終わる transitively. I also think there are people who never use 終える because to them it sounds quite posh/stiff
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.
EDIT: Just one last reference material… This thesaurus entry mentions the usage I noted (講義を終わる, with 講義 being a word you wouldn’t normally use in casual situations) and also 食事を終わる with no mention of them being considered incorrect or questionable (The example table would typically have a triangle symbol instead of a circle for that).
They have different nuances fyi.
As leebo said, this is correct. 講義を終える is also correct, but they are not the same and you certainly cant just say that 講義を終わる is the informal version. 終える is more like to call a stop to the lecture and end it there. 終わる is more like saying you’ve reached the end of the lecture (presumably because of time) and are ending it. Since lectures most often end because times up and not because you needed to stop it part way for some reason, 終わる is actually probably the more common of the two.
likewise
～を食べ終わる is not the same as ～を食べ終える, for example. They each have situations they sound natural in and it follows a similar nuance as above. 食べ終える kinda makes it feel like you surmounted some obstacle lol. Like maybe if someone gave you really bad cooking or a lot of food and you managed to eat it all.
～を見終わる and ～を見終える are the same and again, を見終わる is the one that best describes what people usually want to say imo, yet 見終える is the only one with a jisho entry so it may be confusing.
I think people instinctively use the 自動詞 because they’re the one stopping.
I don’t think that’s quite it - 終わる doesn’t apply to the speaker (not in this usage anyway), and the 自 in 自動詞 doesn’t apply to the speaker either for that matter. 終わる isn’t so much “stopping” as it is “coming to an end” anyway.
Besides, as far as I can tell, it’s not a 自動詞 in that usage. 明鏡国語辞典 has two listings for 終わる: one as a 自動詞, one as a 他動詞. It can be both, and every Japanese dictionary I find that specifies it has an entry for both (and for the ones that don’t, like Goo, they still have an entry for the transitive usage regardless). It seems to be mostly JP→EN dictionaries that exclusively list 終わる as exclusively intransitive for some reason, from what I’ve found anyway.
The distinction is there in the dictionary definitions for 終わる and 終える (from 明鏡国語辞典) as well:
終わる: 続けていたことがそこでおしまいになる。
終える: 続けてきたことをそこでおしまいにする。
The way I read that, 終える implies actively ending something, while 終わる does not - so like Vanilla mentioned, 終わる would be “naturally” reaching the end of a lecture (by running out of material, or reaching the end of the time allotted for it), where 終える would be actively putting an end to it (because something made you decide to do that even though you have material left and it’s not yet time to do so - maybe one of your students accidentally swallowed their desk and you need to take them to the ER or something).
Just for a moment, I thought I had it all figured out 
Your explanation makes a lot of sense, though. Thank you.
机は学生がどう飲めるのん？めっちゃ小さいですか？
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