Any patterns for when a meaning is " to be". For example to help or to be helped. To release, to be released. To bend, to be bent . To mix, to be mixed. To stop to be stopped Etc . I’m constantly getting these mixed up which doesn’t help with the frustration of trying to remember which pronunciation to use for each kanji in a word.
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Theres no guarantees, but in terms of priority:
If one word in the pair ends in す, thats most likely the transitive one. e.g. 返る、返す
If one word in the pair ends in eru and the other one in aru the eru one is most likely the transitive one. E.g. 助ける 助かる
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For the complete list of (for want of a better word) rules: Mastering Transitivity Pairs – Remembering Japanese transitive and intransitive verbs the easy way
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Thankyou both, that makes it much clearer for reviews. Greatly appreciate it!
Now I just need a fool proof way to avoid typos.
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I can say one thing, I never properly studied these and it’s fine. Not only can you guess from context in most cases, but also for most pairs like this, one side will be significantly more common than the other. Like, you will always hear 助ける, but 助かる is much rarer. And even when they are both decently common, like 返る and 返す, they are used in such wildly different contexts, that you can’t really mix them up.
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WWJDIC’s Google ngram corpus search thinks
| 助ける | 1432784 | 64.5% |
|---|---|---|
| 助かる | 787031 | 35.5% |
so 助ける twice as common.
I agree with you in general that exposure in context will cement most of these without having to think too much about rules and patterns for transitive vs intransitive. I get the impression that’s maybe more of a problem if somebody’s WK progress gets a bit far in advance of their other use of the language, and the context is then lacking.
(I still forget which way round 預ける and 預かる are, though, even though in context it’s always obvious.)
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That works when reading (and is only natural since the context of the sentence it is in will be generally be clearly transitive or intransitive). However, it does not help on the production side. When writing something or speaking I need to know which one is the correct one. I guess if your only objective for using your Japanese is for reading, then it does not matter. But if you need to converse in Japanese you should learn the differences.
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Double Check user script 
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You do, but I think that “see them enough in input that one ‘sounds right’ with an object and the other doesn’t” is a workable strategy for this, generally.
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Context helps with that too: natives are likely to understand you even if you use the wrong transitivity here and there unless your sentence happens to be very ambiguous. Not to say that one shouldn’t strive to speak correctly but that gives you little more flexibility to amass enough exposure to organically build an intuition for it.
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