Transitive and intransitive verbs

I can never remember these, and never bother to try. I get the feeling my Japanese would improve a lot if I made the effort. So here goes:

Transitive verbs are the verbs that take an object. As in 'I open the door', vs. 'The door opens'. Here 'open' is both transitive and intransitive in English, so easy to remember. But if we translate it to Japanese we have to use two different verbs: あける and あく。

So 'I open the door' becomes: 私はドーアを開ける。And 'the door opens' becomes ドーアが開く。 Notice that the transitive verb takes a を as the object marker, while the intransitive verb takes a が.

Now it's just a case of remembering all the variations - and there is no rule to help you do this. Here is a list of some transitive and intransitive verbs: