So I’m beginning with 文プロ now and got to the very interesting concept of する verbs and had a question…
If you for some reason knew the noun associated with a potential verb, for example, 交錯 (mixture), but didn’t know the verb form (交ぜる), could you potentially just be like:
「私が交錯をします。」
in order to get what you are trying to say across? I’m sure someone would look at you like “you said that weirdly” but could this be an option to get you out of a pickle?
I’m asking here because I couldn’t find anything about it on imabi and figured I would get a more direct answer here.
You can check if nouns take する in dictionaries (and WK has a note in the part of speech section when they teach you a noun).
That being said, you can’t assume that a noun will have the meaning you intend in that form, or that it will sound right. But it’s better than nothing in a jam, like you imagined.
Your best bet is to check a monolingual dictionary or a trusted example sentence source (i.e. not something like Jisho)
The main thing is that words made from Chinese readings tend to have a more formal or literary feeling than words that come from Japanese origin.
So you are at risk of sounding like a news article if you overuse them.
Ah! Makes much more sense now. I figured it wasn’t that easy, haha.
I’ll start paying more attention to the part-of-speech portion on WK and looking up words I’m unsure of. Still an interesting aspect of Japanese grammar to me.
One more caveat, though it’s maybe more of an advanced layer of this. You can’t assume that a する verb will be either transitive or intransitive just from the fact that you made it using する.
This is where looking up things in the monolingual sources helps.
For example 勉強する (べんきょうする) is transitive.
So you say 日本語を勉強する “I study Japanese” and the transitivity matches English.
But 挑戦する (ちょうせんする) is intransitive.
So even though we would transitively say “Challenge the champion” in English, they say チャンピオンに挑戦する in Japanese.
You don’t have to absorb that all now, but no one ever told me this explicitly and I had to find it out by trial and error, so I thought I could save you some potential confusion eventually (by confusing you now instead, maybe? haha).