So...are some verbs neither transitive or intransitive?

I am looking at some verbs that WK does not indicate as transitive or intransitive, such as:

気に入る TO BE PLEASED, TO BE SATISFIED, TO BE HAPPY
学ぶ TO LEARN, TO STUDY IN DEPTH, TO STUDY

Anyone knows what’s up?

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I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that manabu was transitive. I would guess that the other would be intransitive but I look forward to hearing what people more advanced in grammar would say.

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Most likely an oversight on their part. When you have thousands of items, some things slip through the cracks.

A verb is either transitive or intransitive, it can’t be neither at all.

@Mods sorry for the ping, can you take a look?

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I mean, even if i look at jisho, there’s no type specified. After a quick check I also found 阻む. And 喜ぶ has no type only on jisho.

It did stand out to me too previosly when i was trying to find any pattern in verbs ending in める/む and べる/ぶ after Cure Dolly’s video, but it was too confusing at the time so I just brushed it off for later.

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Well, 入る is supposedly intransitive, but the way 気に入る is used, it seems like the thing that pleases you is the grammatical subject, but it’s you that’s pleased. So it’s not really either?

(I haven’t learnt enough verbs to see much of a pattern, but 好き, for example, also seems to take the thing as the subject (with が) more often than not).

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Though it can be both.

I mean, what would “neither” even mean? It both cannot take an object and cannot not take an object? :stuck_out_tongue:

Well, both of these kinda come down to just “Japanese is not the same as English”. 好き is an adjective, so transitivity doesn’t apply. 気に入る kinda behaves like an adjective too.

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Sorry, English isn’t my first language and I was a bit hesitant on how to express the idea correctly :sweat_smile:

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Nah, I wasn’t questioning your wording, but the simple logic of what the concept would actually mean. :slightly_smiling_face:

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It’s just a matter of how these words were translated. The translations chosen accurately convey the general idea conveyed by these verbs/verb phrases, but not necessarily their transitivity:

気(き)に入(い)る: literally ‘to enter (someone’s) mind’, this means ‘(of a thing) to be pleasing, to be to someone’s liking’. It’s intransitive.

All these verbs or verb phrases can be used transitively, and 学(まな)ぶ is indeed transitive.

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Thanks for that…it will help me remember it better,

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After seeing this post earlier, I got to thinking, I never seem to see 学ぶ in manga.

So of course it showed up my manga reading today.

image

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Frequency illusion?

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Probably.

It turns 学ぶ shows up in one form or another in Flying Witch six times and in Sailormoon five times, none of which I remember noticing =P

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Hey Everyone! We reached out to Jenny Stainton on this, and this was her reply about verb transitivity in Japanese related to how we label them in WK. Hopefully this helps clear some things up!:

Like English verbs, Japanese verbs are at least transitive or intransitive, and some verbs are both (though there are less in Japanese than in English that function both as transitive and intransitive). For verbs that can be both, we typically don’t label their transitivity on WaniKani — they’re just labelled as godan, ichidan, or as a suru verb.

We’re still working on our transitivity labelling (and making some minor updates this week as well). Over the years we’ve been adding the labels to more and more verbs, but we still haven’t gotten to all of them yet.

TL;DR if we haven’t labelled a verb, it’s either because it can be used both transitively and intransitively, or because we are in the process of adding labels and haven’t got to that one yet. We’ll consider also adding labels to those that can be both, to avoid confusion.

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