Small victory, I FINALLY "get" intransitive and transitive
This has been bothering me since I was a total beginner, so happy! I felt like I understood the definitions for what transitive and intransitive verbs are, but I didn't really "get" how they worked with the grammar of a sentence.
I guess I just needed to drill a few hours of practice with the verb-pairs, because I feel like I understand what they mean by transitive verbs having a direct object and intransitive not having one.
It took me a bunch of practice with the trainer here but after enough asking myself if there was a direct object in each sentence (Is it, the person woke up "someone?", or did they just "wake up") I feel like I finally have a good intuitive understanding for transitive-ity in a sentence. Maybe it was really just seeing each transitive pair over and over a bunch of times that helped too.
So if anyone's having trouble with this as well, I really recommend the direct-object approach (transitive verbs have a direct object and intransitive verbs don't). Basically asking "is the verb verbing something? Or is it just verbing?".
To everyone still struggling with this concept: you can do it!
Edit: removed resource name since that was not supposed to be the point of my post.
Edit 2: well, a bunch of people are asking for it anyway so the site is Marumori.