Is there any good way to remember verb tenses (not sure if that’s the right word here).
I’m talking about something like
混む
混ぜる
混ざる
混じる
Are there any rules or even common patterns to this? I feel like maybe える / ある goes along with transitivity possibly with える tending to be transitive and ある being intransitive but beyond that I haven’t figured out any possible patterns. Any suggestions?
My impression is that there are some very loose patterns, like the える・ある one you noted, but they don’t work all the time and there are many variations and exceptions.
I feel like it’s one of those things that is not really worth learning on its own but, as you consume more and more Japanese content, you start to build a bit of an intuition about it.
Just to get the terminology clear, these are all entirely separate verbs, as far as Japanese grammar and grammar explanations go. They happen to be written with the same kanji, and some of them clearly derived from a single root back in the distant past, but if you are looking for explanations in reference books or dictionaries of how the grammar works, they’ll all consider them separate words.
There are a lot of “transitive/intransitive verb pairs”, and there are patterns in those, but the patterns aren’t 100%. Personally my feeling is that this is because there was once an active rule about transitive vs intransitive several thousand years ago, but it is no longer a live rule, and the patterns we see now are the fossilised skeletons left behind.
If you want to look at what the transitive/intransitive patterns are, there’s a good thread about this:
Overall I agree with @simias that this isn’t something worth actively memorising; have a read through the thread, get an overview of how the pairs tend to look, and then learn individual verbs, and let exposure to the language do the rest.