I don’t believe this to be true. 自動詞 and 他動詞 are just the Japanese translations of intransitive and transitive – there is no meaning difference.
Like the English terms, 自動詞 and 他動詞 refer syntactically to whether the verb does or does not take a direct object marked with を. As with English, this almost always lines up with the meaning of the verb, but there are some cases where it doesn’t. (わかる is one example – it is intransitive/a 自動詞 even though the action is not being done by the thing being understood.)
I don’t believe this is a counterexample to my note. It was about actions happening to/upon something else, not about the agent carrying the verb out. For わかる, the action of understanding (or being broken down) is not happening to something, it is just happening, and thus it is intransitive/自動詞.
And I don’t quite believe this to be the case either, as the use of を with intransitives (usually motion verbs, and taking on the meaning of “through” or “along”) syntactically looks like a direct object but isn’t. When considering the semantics however, it becomes clearer why the verbs remain intransitive even though they use を.
In any case, I did include the line “I need to learn more so I can make an assessment to the veracity of it:” because I can’t claim it to be a factual statement, I don’t take it to be a sure-fire method of understanding, but it seems reliable enough so far.
Well, you can always come up with a sufficiently strained interpretation of a given verb’s meaning that makes the subject of the intransitive verb be an action just happening, or whatever. But you could equally say that that act of “knowing” is not happening to something, it is just happening – and yet 知る is transitive.
As you say, を with verbs of motion is not a direct object marker, so it doesn’t affect the transitive/intransitive question. It also doesn’t bear on “is 自動詞 different from intransitive”, because the answer is the same either way – 走る etc do not take a direct object marked with を and so they are intransitive and 自動詞.
Edit: I guess all I’m trying to say is that I recommend you discard that statement because I think it’s founded in a misunderstanding of what the Japanese grammar terms mean.
I understand what you’re trying to get at, but the note isn’t saying that the English use and Japanese use never line up. They will in fact be the same the vast majority of the time because syntax and semantics line up like that when it comes to accusative languages. But in particular for the cases where it doesn’t look like they line up – the を with intransitives case – it points out that you could think of it as the Japanese terms preferring to apply to the semantics and the English applying to the syntax. That is, for a statement like 道を歩く, syntactically it would be called transitive by English standards, but we know it is instead labeled intransitive, which aligns with the semantics. I know this isn’t the only analysis, it is simply meant to be an aid for those that might be confused why を is used with an intransitive verb amongst other possible aids, and I have yet to come across any examples that outright contradict it.
It’d only be misleading if there were at least one example where it misleads you. But as I said I haven’t yet seen any examples of that being the case. Of course the moment I do find such an example, I’ll dismiss the note and shift to another line of reasoning. But as it stands, I do not agree it is misleading until I see an example of it being misleading.
Edit: and I’ll add that it’s not meant to be a permanent aid either. The idea would be that it gets you through it long enough for you to learn the actual meanings or better yet, not need the terms at all to understand.
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