Those would be
雪だるまが私に溶かされる
私は雪だるまを溶かす
Respectively. Neither would use 溶ける
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DeepL has no issue coming up with something… mostly because DeepL has never let anything as minor as ambiguity or a lack of any actual information in a text get in the way of coming up with a natural-sounding translation. 
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This is what I mean about “sometimes an intransitive verb in Japanese doesn’t have an exact intransitive verb match in English”. The fact that the English natural sentence is transitive doesn’t have any bearing on whether the Japanese verb is transitive or not.
見える is an intransitive verb meaning “a thing is visible to an observer”. We happen not to have a verb for that in English, so the translation is a paraphrase. This is a specific quirk of 見える (and a few similar ones like 聞こえる).
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The problem is thinking you can judge how to construct the Japanese sentence based on what happens with the English translation. There’s no causality there to base that on. Whatever happens in English is English’s issue.
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I’m not going crazy here!
I found the grammar point I’m trying to use in my Dictionary of Basic Grammar. It says:
In some expressions, elements which are considered to be direct objects are presented as subjects and are marked by ga. It gives an example:
春子はスペイン語が分かる
Haruko understands Spanish. [Lit. To Haruko, Spanish is understandable.]
分かる is intransitive and this is out of a textbook.
I’m happy to concede to the point that no Japanese person would ever use this regarding Frosty the Snowman, and even that it’s pointlessly confusing (although Google Translate had no problems in handling it, even if apparently ChatGPT did). But it’s clearly a correct grammatical construction for some sentences.
I’m guessing from the reaction on here by experienced people this is not at all a common construction and is best avoided.
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“Considered” by whom? By English speakers who expect “to understand” to take a direct object and be be transitive. わかる is another of the set of corner case verbs where English and Japanese don’t agree about transitivity. Look at the “lit” translation to see what the actual Japanese sentence and grammar is.
IIRC this bit of the dictionary is trying to flag up “some things you think of as transitive are intransitive verbs in Japanese”, with examples, but it doesn’t really explain it very clearly IMHO.
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I don’t understand the point you’re making. This is an intransitive verb used intransitively. What’s notable about this?
If anything I don’t understand what the dictionary is saying:
elements which are considered to be direct objects are presented as subjects and are marked by ga
But it’s only considered the direct object if you translate in English.
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You don’t seem crazy at all - this is really tricky stuff!
I’m glad you shared your textbook’s explanation because I think that explains the source of some of the confusion here. I’m not sure exactly why they imply that Spanish is a direct object in this sentence. As others have pointed out, the literal translation of 春子はスペイン語が分かる makes it clear that nothing is acting on Spanish here - it simply exists as an understandable language. In any case, they do say explicitly that this kind of construction does not work with every intransitive verb.
I feel compelled to say that a computer’s “ability” to make sense of ungrammatical text does not have any bearing on whether that text would make sense to a human being.
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Considered by Seiichi Makino and Michi Tsutsui, the authors of the dictionary, I suppose. This discussion has become pointless. We all agree that
春子はスペイン語が分かる
is unremarkable Japanese, but
私は雪だるまが溶ける
is pointlessly confusing.
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Maybe the reason that I fail to connect with this mode of thinking is because I’m used to dealing with these sorts of “structural changes” in other languages.
For instance in French (and other Romance languages or even Russian) we don’t say that “A likes B” we say “B is liked by A”. So “My mother likes this image” becomes “Cette image plaît à ma mère”. Literally: “This image is pleasant to my mother” or something like that.
But much like 私は日本語がわかる or ネコが見える, this doesn’t mean that it’s some kind of exceptional reversal of common sense. It’s just that the verb has a different meaning and therefore calls for a different syntax.
It’s only bizarre if you consider the English syntax to be the standard you compare and contrast against. Which makes sense if your audience is mainly English native speakers (as I’m sure is the case for this dictionary) but that’s why at some point you have to give up on translation and just engage with the language on its own terms.
Trying to map everything to English in order to make it more approchable for English speakers is both perfectly reasonable and also perfectly hopeless.
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Thank you for bearing with me. I appreciate you patience. Please notice that I’m just comparing the same construction in Japanese in both cases to understand why it’s good Japanese in one case but bad in the other. It has nothing to do with English mapping.
This is what I wanted to find out. Some Japanese verbs can take the construction like mieru and wakaru, but tokeru can’t.
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Yeah you need to be very careful with that, Deepl and Google Translate will always attempt to do a “best effort” translation even if the source is gibberish:
You can’t really proofread your work by just checking that the translation makes sense.
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Now I’ve got home I had a chance to look this up. The Dictionary makes this remark in the article on “ga”, as a cross reference to its article on “~wa ~ga”. That article has a lot more detail on the sentence structure it’s trying to describe, and the categories of thing you can say that way and the common verbs that need that construction (including 見える and 分かる).
I do think the Dictionary is unintentionally a bit confusing in this area – as another example, in its Grammatical Terms section, the entry on Transitive Verb lists a lot of examples of verbs that are intransitive in Japanese but transitive in English, but it doesn’t clearly flag up that that’s what it’s doing and it doesn’t give any example sentences of straightforward transitive verbs, so in our read-through thread of the Dictionary last year it took us a while to figure out what they were trying to say.
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Aye, but it’s not exactly the same - to get from 村人が見えます to 雪だるまが溶ける, you’ve switched out the noun and the verb for different verbs, and at this stage, it still makes sense: “The snowman melts”. The problem came when you attempted to insert yourself as the instigator of an intransitive verb by simply tacking 私は on the front. That’s where you changed the basic structure, and it’s also where you broke the sentence. If you want to change the sentence from being intransitive to being transitive, you also need to switch out the verb (and the particles). 私は雪だるまを溶かす.
Judging by a comment further up in this thread, I rather suspect the dictionary’s description of the use of が versus を in the “rareru2” article is also causing confusion.
And for another another example, hearkening back to a conversation in a different thread a week or two ago, it uses “group 1” and “group 2” for the verb groups. And 一段 is “group 2”. I bet this is the resource that I’d been trying to remember during that thread.
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Indeed… There are many ways of analyzing the grammar of Japanese, and a common point of contention is the degree to which analyzing from a western perspective has warped what people believe about Japanese.
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I think he tries to do an analogy with 見える, which do have an “observer”.
But 溶ける happens on its own, without any third party involved.
It is a semantic difference.
A well known koan states that “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it does a sound?”
It is interesting,
let’s reformulate it using intransitive verbs おちる and きこえる.
While 木が落ちる is true whether there is some one or not in the forest… 聞こえる, by its very definition, needs someone aimed at.
So, indeed, if there is nobody in the forest… can we say 聞こえる ?
Maybe the semantics and grammar of Japanese language add an interesting layer to that 公案
Ah, so that’s what that symbol meant! To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time with the book yet, certainly not as far as page 526 before now. This also explains why additionalramen said that it explicitly talks about particular verbs, but I hadn’t spotted that.
I love the fact that you did a full read through. One day I’d like to do the same.
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If a snowman melts in a forest, and nobody is there to see it, was there ever a snowman in the first place? 
I don’t know that it does. 聞ける would, but 聞こえる just indicates that something is audible, and not necessarily that something is actually there to hear it.
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Yes, but which revision of the Dictionary? Because a new one with “Clearer, more comprehensive explanations” was just released a few hours ago 
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Not sure I think that where the thread is going is actually helpful to the misunderstanding that you’re having so I’ll try to give a different perspective from someone who avoided strict grammar study.
- Stop worrying about English transitive and intransitive. IIRC they aren’t even a direct map to 他動詞 and 自動詞.
- Potential form typically uses が. This is just how japanese works.
- Look up what the actual JAPANESE definition is and stop trying to translate to english and compare those.
- Insert the japanese definition in the word and it should be evident why you use what particles and what it means.
- Bonus: If you don’t understand, just accept it anyways and don’t try to force it
春子はスペイン語が分かる
分かる: 物事の意味・価値などが理解できる
Let’s replace!
春子はスペイン語が理解できる
Wow would you look at that, it makes sense and is a coherent sentence! It also makes sense why you’ll basically never see 分かる in potential. The ability is baked in.
私は雪だるまが溶ける
溶ける: 固まっていたものなどが、熱によって、または液体にひたされて、液状になる
Let’s replace!
私は雪だるまが(熱によって、または液体にひたされて)液状になる。
Wow thats grammatical but makes no fucking sense! This means our initial construction was just weird.
How about 見える like simias said.
私はネコが見える
見える: 目に感ぜられる。目にうつる。
Lets replace for BOTH
私は猫が目に感ぜられる
私は猫が目に映る
Wow those are comically stiff and pretentious ways of saying it but they’re grammatical and completely comprehensible!
Notice how the first definitions are in potential? Its no coincidence that the words getting brought up in this thread 見える、聞こえる、分かる aren’t going to be found in potential form. They have the potential form baked into them. And what does rule 2 say about the potential form? We typically use が.
本を読む ? Wonderful
本を読むことができる？→本が読める
All is as we would expect.
Bonus: So the actual difficult question, IMO, is if this stuff is all the “normal” way of doing it, then when are the cases where we would use を？You might be surprised to learn that を分かる is used by natives, and you can use を with verbs in potential as well. But thats a discussion for another day! Getcho basics down first.
TL;DR understand the actual japanese definitions of the words you are trying to use, and the proper way to use them will become a lot more clear. You can’t just swap out words and expect things to make sense without understanding any underlying differences baked into those words’ definitions.
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