One recurring grammar area that I find I have to revise with almost all my students is transitive and intransitive verbs. I’ve done a few blog posts and videos on them which you can find here, here and here.
It’s an area of Japanese that I struggled with, but on reflection this was partly due to the topic not being introduced until later. It is so important that it should be learnt right after you’ve done the verb basics like past tense, negative tense etc.
Indeed, it was grammar guides like Tae Kim’s (that puts it in the ‘verb basics‘ section) and IMABI’s (which puts them in ‘beginners II‘) that first made me realise that I should have been learning this area of Japanese a lot earlier than I did.
Don’t be too intimidated by the tables and charts on the IMABI page, as you don’t need to memorise these charts to do well in transitivity and intransitivity. Instead, as I coach in my lessons and on the posts/videos I have done, you want to go by examples sentences and verb pairs.
So let’s look at what transitive and intransitive verbs are, why they’re useful, and how to better understand them.
What are transitive and intransitive verbs?
While a technical grammar term and only really used by linguists and language teachers, essentially most verbs are either transitive or intransitive.
This is a way of categorising verbs so that you know who does what and to whom.
For example, with a ball, it can be dropped or it can fall. When considering something as being ‘dropped’, we know that a person or other animate being has done this action; the ball was held, and then released.
However, if a ball just rolls off a table, it has fallen. In this case, we don’t really ascribe an actor or agent making this happen, it is more just a function of gravity, friction etc (look, I’m not a physics teacher).
So dropping the ball involves a direct agent, and these are the transitive verbs. Whereas when the action happens without this agent’s involvement, these are intransitive verbs. One way I like to describe this is that a transitive verb happens because someone has done something, whereas for an intransitive verb it is more that we are just sitting there observe it.
For example, with a car we can hit the brake pedal and stop the car, this would be a transitive action.
But if the car rolls down a hill and slams into a wall, the car has stopped.
So we have done an action in the first, but not in the second.
Now, it can get a little confusing, because you can still use an intransitive verb in the first example as well. For instance, say that you were watching the car roll down the hill, but then it stopped without hitting anything. Of course, you can infer that someone likely hit the brake, but if you’re just wanting to make a comment on what you have just seen, you may want to merely say, ‘the car stopped’.
So despite someone actually hitting the brake and stopping the car, the reality is that the car still stopped and you observed that, so you may want to describe that reality. This is where knowing about intransitivity can be very useful.
In Japanese the way transitivity works is complicated because we introduce the concept of particles and verb pairs. While we may have separate words such as the fall/drop example in English, we often achieve transitivity in English via word order:
- I stopped the car.
- The car stopped.
Japanese, instead, went for having the ‘same word’ but having a transitive and intransitive version of each. As mentioned above, the use of the particle reveals the grammatical relationship between those two words.
One way to see this, is to use a dictionary like Takoboto and just look up any verb, then from the ‘See more’ option or the details panel on the right, scroll down to the kanji section. I’ll do with the word おとす:
So once you’ve learnt these two words, おとす and おちる, the last thing is to pair them with the appropriate particle. を・に and other particles are going to be used with transitive verbs, and anytime you are dealing with an intransitive verb, this を will change to は・が.
If you need to brush up on your particles, check out Tae Kim’s lessons here.
But the key takeaway here is that as the を particle is needing a direct object, it is perfect for transitive verbs and cannot work with intransitive verbs. When you hit the brake, you need to point out that YOU are the person who hit the brake, which is what を does.
When the car just stops, there is nothing that を can point to as taking ACTION to stop that car. It just stopped.
So we end up with:
- ボールが落ちる・ボールを落とす
- 車を止めた・車が止まった
If you want some examples, here is a news clip talking about people stopping their cars on a highway to do a bit of road rage and it mentions that the people stopped their cars thus 車を止めた:
Or this athletics training website showing a ball being dropped, thus ボールを落とす:
Another example was from a show of Sumos versus Entertainers 怪力バトルフィールド：現役力士VS肉体派芸能人 where one of the entertainers was shoved so hard he had a bit of a wardrobe malfunction.
The purple text is what 横川尚隆 is saying, as he is using 出る, meaning ‘something’ has ‘come out’ or ‘appeared’. This is contrasted with 出す, the transitive verb to ‘put something out there’. You can use your imagination as to what he is referring to.
He then uses this difference in words to make a joke:
‘It’s hard to deal with (the loss), but I put it all out there’.
One of the few jokes that actually works even when translated.
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