I get that it’s technically incorrect translation or whatever…but I don’t really understand why “to suit” is a blocked synonym for 合わせる when Wanikani themselves use it as a translation for the word in their context sentences? Just kinda confused at how that works.
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@Mods what do you say about this?
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合わせる doesn’t technically mean “to suit”. It is the causative form of 合う, which does mean “to suit”. How the causative form works is a little murky, but it basically tells you that the actor of the sentence, in some way, caused the verb to happen, whether it be by forcing someone or something to do the verb, by allowing it, or by setting up a situation where the verb would happen. That’s why it actually means something like “to cause suiting/joining/matching” which is simplified to “to unify/join (something) together”.
In clauses that use causative verbs, the doer of the verb that is being caused by the actor is usually marked with に or を, which makes sense because they would be the object/target of the coercing/forcing/allowing.
For those context sentences though, I’m a little confused because they could be read as “causing (the needs, others, or one’s convenience) to suit (something)” or “causing (an unmentioned object or target) to suit (the needs, others, or one’s convenience)”. I imagine that this is phrase is fairly common enough that when said, people understand what the implied unmentioned object or target is. In the first sentence, the implied object is oneself, so one is causing oneself to suit others by adapting oneself. In the third sentence, the object has to be either stated or derived from context, but whatever it is, it is being caused to suit one’s convenience.
In any case, Wanikani provides simplified, tidied up translations. So it’s not that the verb itself means “to suit”, it’s that in English, you wouldn’t say “that thing is being caused to suit my convenience”, you would say “that thing suits my convenience” or “that thing is convenient for me”. I imagine they specifically put “to suit” in the block list so you wouldn’t learn it as being the same as the base verb 合う.
Take this with a grain of salt tho, I’m not that well versed in Japanese grammar, this is just from what I’ve learned so far.
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Hey doom-style! I’ll pass this along to the content team to see what they think about it, and/or see if they want to make a change! 
Thanks for the ping @prouleau!
-Nick at WK
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I agree with everything said here, even though that may seem contradictory, because
- this was really difficult for me to learn since it doesn’t really have an equivalent in English that sounds at all natural, so I was only able to learn it by seeing it used, trying to use it myself, and adjusting based on the way people react (positive, negative, or just plain confused) to my usage
- and even so, it would have been even more difficult for me to understand 合わせる if I’d been taught (explicitly or implicitly) that it’s the same as 合う
so it’s gonna be tough for all involved. 頑張ろう！
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We got a response from one of our native speakers on staff:
“to suit” is generally translated to 合う or 似合う, and we don’t want the users to mix up the two uses. Having said that, when it means “to suit A (to B),” it can be translated to 合わせる. So I agree that it’s not fair to list “to suit” in the block list. I moved it to the warning list instead with the message “That’s possible in some contexts, but what’s the more general meaning for this word?”
-Nick at WK
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