I think you confused what they wrote. What they were saying is you shouldn’t assume a Japanese verb’s transitivity based on a natural English translation not that it’s wrong to use the terms ‘transitive’ and ‘intransitive’.
anditwillrain–Thank you for pointing out the limitations of that rule. I haven’t encountered those words before. A preview of coming attractions. As athomasm wrote, there’s nothing wrong with the terminology, the point is that Japanese has separate verb forms for intransitive and transitive verbs while some English verbs can do both jobs. Thanks for your remarks.
I’m sorry, I totally misunderstood what you were saying! That explains why I was so confused by your comment. And thanks @athomasm for trying to clarify for me.
I only know those limitations because I thought it was a thing early on-- and then got walloped when I started realizing there were so many exceptions. Lesson learned: I shouldn’t rely on assumed generalities.
It has a chart of different transitive/intransitive pair endings. It’s definitely valid to see a pattern with ones like あげる・あがる but there are many different patterns so it’s best not to assume too much. Once you learn more verbs you’ll start to get a sense for which ones are transitive and intransitive, but it never hurts to check to make sure you’re right.
I think it’s useful to start thinking of verbs in this way rather than the English grammar one once you get the concept.
As another Cure Dolly adherent, this article probably helped me the most in deciphering it all and it’s something I was also starting to realize intuitively through immersion and going through WK.
I don’t get why some people use the overly literal translations “self move” and “other move” though. Are we going to start calling na-adjectives (形容動詞) “shape form move” too?
Honestly, “shape form move” makes more sense to me for na-adjectives. At least, that’s why it’s helpful to me to think of them as such. The mental paradigm makes more sense in the context of Japanese IMO.
形容動詞 - na-adjective, can be thought of as a noun that needs a verb, the 動詞, since it needs a な added in order to act as an adjective where な is another form of だ/です
形容詞 - i-adjective, can be though of as a self contained -ism that is related to verbs since they conjugate
And even in typing this out it’s hard to adequately convey the meaning of even 形容 in English when you’ve learned the different words that the kanji are used in and get a better mental understanding of the meaning. It feels more abstract than just “shape form” would imply.
But then, that’s just how I do it. I’m sure everyone has their own mental models that help them mold the English brain into the Japanese way.
This is perfect!! The voice is maddening, so I feel like I actually got more out of the article than the video, even though it’s the same information. Thanks for posting this!
So I’m a total beginner, but it seems to me that this transitive/intrasitive distinction in the Japanese language is basically the distinction between the active and the passive voice. For example, ‘to raise’ is active voice while 'to be raised (by someone or something) would be the passive voice.
Almost, but not quite. I feel like the literal translation from the Japanese words really is the best way to say it: self move vs other move. It may be safe to say that all verbs that are translated as passive voice are self move verbs, but not all self move verbs are passive voice. As the beginning of the Cure Dolly article mentions:
We’ll start off by looking very quickly at what transitive and intransitive verbs are, because some people get confused and mix up intransitive with the so-called “passive” (it isn’t really passive).
The link goes into an exhaustive explanation. But basically, she argues that at the root, these self move/other move pairs are just using variations on ある (to be) and する (to do) to differentiate. The example of 従う (to obey, follow, accompany) vs 従える (to subdue, be accompanied by) illustrates the point. Neither are passive, and both can be transitive in English. But the first case is a self move, while the latter is an other move.
Here’s a simple example to show why that’s not quite right.
（彼が）ボールを落とした
ボールが落ちた
（彼に）ボールを落とされた
The first one uses the transitive verb 落とす, and means “(he) dropped the ball”.
The second one uses the intransitive verb 落ちる, and means “the ball fell”.
The third one uses the passive form of 落とす, and means “the ball was dropped (by him)”.
There’s an important distinction between the second and third sentences. In the second, the ball fell on its own, giving no indication of whether or not someone caused it to happen. In the third, it’s explicitly stated that the ball was dropped by someone or something, even if we don’t know by who or what.
Transitive: The subject (が) does something (verb) to another noun (を）Children play games. こどもたちがゆうぎをあそびます。ゆうぎ＝games
Intransitive: The subject (が) does something (verb).
No other noun is involved. Children play. こどもたちがあそびます。You can say anything else you want about where, when, how, and why the children play, and the verb is still intransitive. WHERE: 子どもたちが公園であそびます。Children play in the park. WHEN: がっこうのあとで、こどもたちがあそびます。Children play after school. HOW: こどもたちがしずかにあそびます。Children play quietly. WHY: こどもたちがまなぶためにあそびます。Children play to learn.The one thing you CANNOT say is WHAT the children play. When you say that, the verb becomes transitive. Why? Because transitive verbs tell you what the subject verbs.
I hope this helps you to understand the concept better.
This isn’t an accurate view of transitivity in Japanese. 遊ぶ is intransitive. You can’t make it transitive like you could in English just by adding a direct object (a noun marked by を). It’s very rare for a verb in Japanese to be both transitive and intransitive. Generally there are two different verbs in a pair, one that’s transitive and one that’s intransitive.
To expand a bit on @seanblue’s post, 遊ぶ means only “play around, have fun”. If you want to play something as you would in English, the verb is usually する instead - ゆうぎをする. Not that I’ve ever actually come across the word ゆうぎ before…
(Side note, playing musical instruments use a whole different set of verbs, depending on how it’s played.)
And thanks 
Thanks for posting this!