I do not yet have an overarching theory of 他動詞 (tadōshi, transitive) and 自動詞 (jidōshi, intransitive) verb pairs, unfortunately, other than to say that learning them is often a long process of getting used to it. I wrote about one example in particular, an exception to the rule, over at the newsletter, and talked about it on the podcast this month:

I initially thought that my example might connect to 見つかる (mitsukaru, find) and 決まる (kimaru, decide), but it does not other than that I did come across this 見つかる example while researching:

他の似たような動詞を挙げて、上記のような現象が起こる法則性について述べた 辞書、文法書は残念ながら（手元にあるもののからは）見つかりませんでした。

I wasn’t able to find any other dictionaries or grammar texts (at least among the ones I currently have) listing other similar verbs or explaining the rules for how this functions.

Translating this sentence without the subject I feels very strange in English, but using 見つかる, which has no explicit human actor, is clearly very natural in Japanese.

I feel like this is one of those phrases that are particularly difficult for non-native speakers to master because we’re so used to starting with a subject. And there is a subject—someone doing the action—in the Japanese as well, it’s just implied by context and it is perfectly natural not to explicitly state it. In other words, it’s natural to say “The objects were not found” instead of “I, the subject of this sentence, didn’t find any objects.”

Just as it is perfectly natural to say “something has/hasn’t been decided” by using 決まっていない (kimatte inai) or 決まった (kimatta).

I guess my main, lingering question is “Is there a way to determine statistically whether XがYを見つけた (X ga Y o mitsuketa) is more natural or used more frequently than Yが見つかった (Y ga mitsukatta). None of the searches I was turning up seemed convincing one way or the other. This may just be a case of the flexibility of the language and the speaker/writer being able to emphasize one thing or the other by choosing between these phrases.

My recommendation to students might be to err on the side of 自動詞. As Jay Rubin has noted, “Warning: This language works backwards.” Sometimes it can benefit students to embrace the phrase that seems most unnatural in their native language, which in this case (comparing against English, obviously) is 見つかる.

The title to this post is an obvious nod to Rubin’s Making Sense of Japanese, in which he puns “You say 決める, I say 決まる.”