The Second Verb Is Not a Second Event

{{first_name | みんな}}さん、こんにちは ☕

入（はい）り込（こ）む.

入る is "to enter." 込む, if you know it at all, you know as "in." Add them and you get enter-enter, which is not a meaning. 👀

Here is the part worth sitting with: nothing broke. No alarm went off. You took something vague from the sentence and moved on, and you never found out.

That is one of the actual words a researcher watched advanced learners stall on. Not a wrong answer. No answer at all.

Know someone who reads compound verbs by adding the halves? Send them this. Share this issue →

You have been reading 複合動詞（ふくごうどうし）, compound verbs, by adding the front half to the back half. Everyone does. It is the right instinct. 🚪

It also works. Hand learners unfamiliar compound verbs to guess at, and accuracy climbs with more context, and again with higher proficiency. The larger studies surveyed up to 121 learners.

Now the ceiling. Even at best, average accuracy by category came out near 58 percent, 26 percent and 16 percent, depending on which kind of second verb was in the word. Nobody could tell which kind they were looking at. ⚡

So the honest sentence is not "this fails." It is worse. It works often enough that you never find out about the times it did not. 💡

Nobody named this for you, and that is not a chapter you skipped. Somebody counted: across four intermediate textbooks, compound verbs turn up between 117 and 237 times each, and are explicitly taught as a thing zero, four, two and five times. 📌

They fall in the crack between the vocabulary half of a book and the grammar half, and neither half claims them. There is no chapter. 🎴

So keep adding. Change what you are adding.

Most of the time the second verb is not a second event. It is the shape of the first one: which way it went, how deep it got, whether it reached the end, whether it hit the limit. 🎯

〜出（だ）す. Outward, or the event appearing, usually unplanned. 泣（な）き出す, to burst into tears. 降（ふ）り出す, of rain. So ❌ 今日（きょう）から日本語（にほんご）を勉強（べんきょう）し出します is off, and ✅ 勉強し始（はじ）めます is right. You cannot announce your own plan with it. A strong tendency, not a banned form.

〜込（こ）む. Inward. Into a space, 飛（と）び込む, or deeper into a state, 話（はな）し込む, 思（おも）い込む. 📝

〜抜（ぬ）く. Through, against resistance, by will. 生（い）き抜く, やり抜く.

The rest, one line each. 〜直（なお）す is again, usually to correct. 〜通（とお）す is one state held start to finish. 〜上（あ）げる is up, and so finished.

〜切（き）る does two jobs, and there is a test. Put the word in the 〜きれない form. Does it sound like something a person would say?

Yes: 読（よ）み切れない, more than I can finish reading. 使（つか）い切れない, more than I can get through. That 切る means to the end.

No: 疲（つか）れ切れない is odd. That 切る means to the limit, and it leaves a state behind. You do not complete being exhausted. You arrive at it and stay. 😅

Two published tests separate these two jobs. The four-second packaging is ours.

〜出す and 〜込む alone account for over twelve thousand occurrences in one corpus of ordinary non-fiction. Furniture, not advanced vocabulary. 📚

「後（うし）ろを見（み）る」. Look at the back half. Anything you already have with Japanese in it. About fifteen minutes.

You will know you did it when: one of your eight is a word where adding the halves gave you nothing, and you can say in one sentence what the second verb did instead.

Optional, once: Japan's national language research institute keeps a free database of about 2,700 compound verbs at vvlexicon.ninjal.ac.jp, searchable by the second verb, no account needed.

You were never adding wrong. You were adding the wrong kind of thing. Verb plus verb gives you enter-enter. Verb plus shape gives you a sentence.

Hit reply with the compound verb that gave you nothing when you added it up. We are collecting them, and the ones that keep coming back are going into a future issue. 🍵