I know that when learning 広げる for example it helped me remember that it was transitive by putting the meaning as “To Spread Something” and in general I know that I’ve seen a lot of the transitive verbs wanting their meaning to take the form “To ___ something”.
I just learned 分ける, and thought, “aha, this was transitive, to the answer must be ‘To split something’”, but it was marked as incorrect because only “To split” was accepted. I feel like, the consistancy isn’t necessarily needed for the Meanings list, because it could bloat it if you want to also include the meanings without ‘something’ at the end, but it feels to me like the “___ something” versions should at least be accepted answers.
I’m wondering if I’m misunderstanding something and “To split something” is not a valid meaing for 分ける, and if I’m not, how to suggest that meaning is added to the list of accepted answers.
“To split something” is absolutely a valid meaning for 分ける.
Transitive verbs in Japanese take a direct object (via the を particle) which is precisely what the “something” is in the English version. More recent additions to WK, like 広げる, have got the “something” on the end which makes good sense because it forces the user to know the transitivity.
There’s too much edit distance between “To spread something” and “To spread out” to be able to accidently use the wrong one and still get it accepted. 分ける was added to WK a long time ago before they had put so much effort into avoiding transitivity mistakes in answers.
It would make sense to change the earlier verbs to be the same but I guess that’s a long job.
I don’t really think so. I just did a quick check and there seem to be less than 600 Transitive verbs taught on WK. They’re also already tagged so extracting them shouldn’t be difficult, someone would simply have to change the meaning and mass replace/add them back in.
I don’t know what their internal systems look like and how many people they can put on the job but it doesn’t sound like a huge undertaking. I’d probably even do it for them because I really want this change as well.
Question might be “how many transitive verbs have their intransitive pair in WaniKani too?” If they’re not pairs, you might not need to make the transitivity that explicit.
I think this might be the biggest challenge. The rest can be kind of scripted. From the transitive/intransitive pairs I’ve seen so far only a handful really required synonyms. The rest was okay-ish and in some cases it’s really hard to argue which English word or phrase would objectively fit better.
By the way, if anyone else reading this is new to WaniKani and hadn’t realised this, like I hadn’t when writing this post initially, you can add your own answers by clicking the ‘Add Synonm’ button on the word info。You can do this during a test:
Not sure if this was explained to me somewhere near the start and I skipped over it, or if the devs simply expected that I had eyes, because the button is right there, haha. Anyway, wanted to update with that work-around for any new users that find this post and are as blind as me! ^^
I took all the verbs marked transitive or intransitive and the excluded cases where they are marked as both (e.g. 引く). That resulted in 816 words.
Then I grouped those words based on the characters with hiragana removed so as to group them by base kanji. That resulted in 621 base kanji groups containing 816 individual words.
And then finally I selected only groups that contained at least one transitive verb and at least one intransitive verb. I was surprised that this list went down to only 156 base kanji groups containing 335 individual words.
To conclude:
WK only has 156 verb groups* (same kanji, different okurigana) that contains at least one transitive verb and at least one intransitive verb.
* Groups and not just pairs because some groups (e.g. 上) have more than two words in them.
Verb stems that have at least one transitive and at least one intransitive
Slug
SlugNoHiragana
Meaning
Transitive
Intransitive
上る
上
To Climb
False
True
上がる
上
To Rise
False
True
上げる
上
To Raise
True
False
下げる
下
To Lower
True
False
下がる
下
To Get Lower
False
True
並べる
並
To Line Up
True
False
並ぶ
並
To Be Lined Up
False
True
乗せる
乗
To Give A Ride
True
False
乗る
乗
To Ride
False
True
乱す
乱
To Put In Disorder
True
False
乱れる
乱
To Be In Disorder
False
True
乾かす
乾
To Dry Something
True
False
乾く
乾
To Get Dry
False
True
交わる
交
To Intersect
False
True
交じる
交
To Be Mixed
False
True
交ぜる
交
To Mix
True
False
付く
付
To Be Attached
False
True
付ける
付
To Attach
True
False
代える
代
To Replace
True
False
代わる
代
To Replace
False
True
… and so on.
Excluded verb stems
I looked at the excluded words and it looked correct to me:
Thanks for bringing this up! We agree that we should add “to __ something” as a possible meaning answer (either to the meanings section or on the allow list) for all transitive verbs. We’ve been adding some recently, and we’ll try to go through some more this week, particularly the ones mentioned in the thread
Recently got dinged for this one, unfortunately. Saw 集める, went “ah well in english you can use this transitively or intransitively so ill be specific” and it turns out it didn’t accept the ___ something answer at all. Glad to see its being looked into!
