Hello all. I wasn’t sure where to put this question in the end. Wanikani feedback, Grammar or here. As you can see, I made a decision.
I’ve been getting a bit frustrated perhaps with Wanikani verbs. At least, I believe it’s just verbs. I want to decide if I’m the issue here.
A lot of the time we get taught a Kanji such as 見 and then some usage for it in vocab like 見る、みせる and みえる. This is just one case of many. My frustration comes from Wanikani sporadically teaching certain usages without really explaining why it’s せる, れる, える and so on.
From what I understand, which is limited to be fair, these are rules for conjugation, such as what is often considered things like passive conjugation and so on. Rather than explaining this from the start in some early lessons, we instead get explanations like “remember its れる (rare) to occur” or the likes. Along with a heavy focus on what is transitive and intransitive.
I know Wanikani is to teach Kanji and not grammar but if it’s going to present more than just the kanji then why not explain this at least partly in the early cases. Would it not help a lot in understanding later lessons and grammar itself down the line?
A small example again but I think みえる being taught as “To Be Visible” is fine but not as helpful as “Can See” which seems a lot closer to everything taught by grammar elsewhere. Of course they mean the same thing entirely but To Be Visible seems less helpful compared to what is taught from grammar externally?
Am I missing something obvious? Is there a reason for the heavy focusing on transitive and intransitive. There’s more and more times where I feel the meanings are super unhelpful to what I learn from grammar.
Sorry if I wrote this a bit messy as I’m not entirely sure on myself and just want a bit of outside perspective here. Perhaps there are grammar rules and reasoning’s I don’t yet know.
Just like Yandros pointed out, in the case of Wanikani they are actually different verbs – they look a lot like conjugations tbh but in this case they are not.
みる to see, the action of your eyes sending images to your brain. The subject (tagged with が) is the one having eyes, the thing being seen is the object (を）私が木を見る I see a tree.
みれる the potential form of the above, to be able to see. 私が木を見れる I can see
a tree.
みえる to have the ability of being seen (to be seen, to appear) 木が見える A tree can be seen (which is the natural way to say “I can see a tree”, but note how the perective is shifted, in English the subject is the seer I can see a tree , but in Japanese they prefer to say "a tree is visible)
みせる to make something in a state it can be seen (to show) 子供に木を見せる I show a tree to the child.
They all share a root み with a meaning of “vision”, but are different on nuance and perspective (and grammar pattern)
To sneak in another bullet point after this one, the conjugation of みる that this resembles is the causative form みさせる, to make someone see (which is, I dunno, grab their head and point it at what you’re looking at?)
The textbook conjugation is 見られる, though 見れる does get used in the real world (see ら抜き言葉)
My go-to example for this vs. 見える is something like “I can watch a movie because I have time”. This is very different from the type of “can see” that 見える represents.
Yes, perhaps that’s the issue. I thought these were all conjugations and not new verbs. The same in all the future cases where we get the same kanji with multiple similar endings. I thought I was just getting conjugated verbs constantly and being expected to memorise them.
I’ve also never understood why it enforces the transitive and intransitive parts of these verbs. Is there something I’m missing there or is it just to help figure out the “direction” of the verb?
If they didn’t teach it you wouldn’t be able to use them correctly, so it seems important to me in that sense (I do realize it’s not the only thing that matters for correct usage, so you might still use them incorrectly for other reasons). It’s worth noting that transitivity isn’t necessarily expressed when learning the English gloss. It can differ.
For instance 分かる is intransitive, but is usually taught and translated as “to understand”, which is transitive.
Other examples include
会う [intransitive] and “to meet (someone)” [transitive]
合格する [intransitive] and “to pass (a test)” [transitive]
挑戦する [intransitive] and “to attempt (a challenge)” [transitive]
An example in the opposite direction isn’t coming to mind this moment, but I’m sure one exists.
Oh, remembered one
卒業する [transitive] and “to graduate” [intransitive]
To add onto Leebo’s point, to my understanding, transitivity is not about the direction of a verb so much as it’s about whether the subject of a sentence is acting (intransitive) or being acted upon (transitive). So in that sense it’s pretty important for comprehension to know when a verb is transitive or intransitive. For further reading on this I would recommend checking out Tofugu’s writeup if you haven’t already: Japanese Transitive and Intransitive Verbs
Yah, the trouble with transitivity is that while English verbs have transitivity, generally the transitive/intransitive pairs are the same verb, and often intransitive verbs are used as though they’re passive, and so the concept of transitivity is never really covered in school. “The dog caught the ball” versus “The ball was caught”.
Distinct transitive/intransitive pairs are few and far between (e.g. “They laid him on the green” versus “He lay on the green”)
This Japanese Ammo with Misa video helped me make sense of what’s going on with transitivity. In it she gives the example of someone said “The computer broke” and her thought was “What did the computer break?”
There’s an idea I had, probably because of the distinction rarely existing in English, that if the wrong one is used a Japanese person would realise you just meant the other one. But, these are technically two different words and it’s going to be less immediately obvious.
To a beginner, it feels a bit different in Japanese to English. If there’s a truly intransitive verb in English, it can’t take an object conceptually, like to sunbathe. The many verbs that aren’t conceptually limited are used either way like bathe, even though they may be used more one way than the other.
In Japanese it feels like intransitivity is a grammar point rather than a concept point. You can make an intransitive verb conceptually transitive by prefacing with Xは or Xが, so “appear” becomes “can see something”. The verb technically remains intransitive in the Japanese sentence and you can’t use Xを. That must make teaching a direct translation difficult. I think that’s why we see passive conjugations used in the English translations of verbs that are intransitive in Japanese. We are turning it into an English grammar point.
For example couldn’t you use 溶ける (to melt intransitive) as 溶かす (to melt transitive) by using が instead of を? The snowman is melted by me - I melt the snowman.
Forgive me if I’ve picked this up wrongly. This is just something I’m starting to wrap my brain around.
Thanks all. This does explain it very well. Glad to have confirmed I was the issue which I had suspected. I’ve been doing this for a little while now but still struggle with the 20 something 見 vocabs and was really starting to think there had to be a better way to understand the little changes in each.
I’ll take some more time to understand the concepts behind transitivity and how it’s being used here. I feel like reading some of the discussion on it here has actually confused me more but I’ll revisit them once I understand the basics a bit better for how it works.
Appreciate the help, everyone!
I think you may be confused here. A Japanese intransitive verb is always intransitive: it’s never “conceptually transitive” and it doesn’t change meaning depending on whether the subject is explicitly stated or left implied because it’s obvious in context.
(Incidentally transitivity vs intransitivity is a grammar point in both languages: the difference is that in English it’s part of the structure of the sentence whether a verb has a direct object or not, but in Japanese the direct object has an explicit marker and you use different verbs rather than using the same verb in both situations.)
No, 溶ける is always intransitive: 雪が溶ける : the snow melts. Even if a subject is not stated there is implicitly one: 溶けた : “[it] melted”. You can’t attach an を at all. There is no actor doing the melting in this sentence.
Conversely, 溶かす is always transitive, even if the subject or object is left unstated:
魔女が雪を溶かした : the witch melted the snow
雪を溶かした : [somebody] melted the snow
魔女が溶かした : the witch melted it
溶かした : they melted it
(I speculate that Japanese has separate transitive/intransitive pairs partly because it drops clauses rather than using pronouns. In English the pronouns in “it melted” vs “they melted it” keep the two distinct, but in Japanese the different verb is what tells you the difference between 溶けた and 溶かした.)
The thing that can make this confusing is that although most of the time “Japanese verb is transitive” and “the meaning is that actor does action to object” and “the English translation also uses a transitive verb” all line up, there are as @Leebo says some cases where it doesn’t. My suggestion here is to concentrate on the Japanese grammar and meaning and not to worry too much about what the English equivalent is.
I think you are right about concentrating on the Japanese and not worrying about the equivalent English. But this part of the conversation confuses me.
However so is 見える, yet there’s the context sentence: 村人が見えますか Can you see the villager? still intransitive in Japanese but translated to active transitive in English.
So why can’t I say 私は雪だるまが溶ける to mean I melt the snowman? Isn’t it the same construction as the context sentence from 見える?
Mostly because it’s a whole lot smoother English than “is the villager visible to you?”
Because that’s not grammatical. Or at best, it’s confusing - “Speaking of me, the snowman melts [on its own]”, but how does the snowman melting relate to my presence in the sentence? Maybe I am a melting snowman.
You can’t just take a sentence, swap out all the nouns and verbs while retaining the basic structure, and still expect it to make the same sense. Don’t get confused by the English translation - the only thing that matters is how it works in Japanese. The English is there as a guide to understanding, but it’s not a literal word-for-word representation of how the grammar functions in Japanese.
I will try to apply what Leebo reminded me yesterday…溶ける is an intransitive verb, so it grammatically cannot take a direct object, which in your example sentence is the snowman. It can only be used to mean that something melts on its own, not that someone or something melts something else.
Wouldn’t it only make sense if people are arguing about whether the snowman is melting or not, and somebody was to say “as far as I’m concerned, the snowman is melting”? And even then it would probably be clearer with 私としては⋯
I don’t see how it could ever imply that you are the one doing the melting, because obviously you would phrase that differently (probably with 溶かす).
For what it’s worth, ChatGPT completely balks when asked to translate 私は雪だるまが溶ける, calling it “awkward and ambiguous”.
