I hate the concept of mixing things in Japanese. There’s like 7,000 different words for mixing things and I almost always get them wrong. I cannot keep separate “to mix” and “to be mixed,” especially because I feel like the rules are different for each set of words, or there’s an exception here or there that makes something in my brain just fail.
One day I’m going to be level 60 and the only words left in my review are going to involve mixing things. I really just want to travel back in time and convince whoever conceived of these ideas that 95% of them were unnecessary and can we please just use one word?
Yeah, I kinda feel like in general Koichi doesn’t sufficiently emphasise the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, often having the same form be the answer for both terms. That and his mnemonics for intransitive verbs generally involve someone else doing the transitive verb, like “you did it, so it’s transitive” and “you didn’t do it, so it’s intransitive”.
Is it normal to eventually forget the mnemonics though? I learn them for a while, but I don’t think about them every time. Once I know the kanji, I just know it. Then I forget why I know it, but I just do, and I’ve forgotten the story behind it. For most things I feel like that won’t pose a problem, but in terms of reading fluency you can’t rely on the mnemonics forever.
I read on WK before something about ~aru generally being intransitive but for things such as all the mixes that don’t follow this pattern, is there any way to recognize them easily? Even if I came up with mnemonics, there’s still so many variations that I’d probably just jumble the mnemonics themselves up since the only difference is some of the ending hiragana.
Some of these are just the fact that different kanji imply different nuances for the same word. In other cases, WK just ignores that these other kanji are even possible.
WK teaches 聞く and 聴く, but not 訊く.
WK teaches 務める and 勤める, but not 努める.
Yep, that’s the purpose of them. They’re a framework for helping you to remember them, just like scaffolding is used to help construct a building - but once the building is constructed, you take the scaffolding down.
Yeah, that’s not really that great a way to think of it. For verbs in which the transtive/intransitive verb pairs end in ～ある and ～える, the ～ある one does tend to be the intransitive one, true, but that’s not a defining characteristic of intransitive verbs.
