Oh yeah, I’m familiar with くれる: that group of verbs was probably my greatest nemesis while studying Japanese at uni, ngl. I’ve definitely heard 分かってくれる being used when talking about other people understanding the subject of the clause (often with a sort of emotional/dramatic feeling–like, “Why can’t you understand me?!” or “At least you get me”), which is why I interpreted it that way, but it definitely doesn’t mean the other interpretation isn’t possible or even likely!
…alright, I was going to just leave it there, but you sparked my curiosity, so I went ahead and grabbed a mirror of Kitsunekko and did a simple grep for (分|わ)かってくれ to see what kind of contexts it’s used in. Here’s a random few where I happened to have the video on hand with English subs (far from infallible, but saves me the trouble of making my own clumsy translations and they all seemed reasonable to me).
example transcripts + translations
Yuru Yuru S02E11
苦節23話目にして
やっとスタッフさんたちも―
あかりが主役って
分かってくれたみたい
Akari: After 23 episodes, the staff has finally realized that I’m the protagonist!
Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters E072
海馬ついに結束の意味をわかってくれたの
Yugi: Kaiba, do you finally understand the meaning of teamwork?
Amagi Brilliant Park S01E08
(giving a lot of extra context for this one–this is an example of one of those dramatic situations!)
(further context: I don’t really remember, but basically Kimura and Tsuchida like each other but one of the other characters who was impersonating Kanie (the MC of the show) using some magical suit kind of threw a wrench into things, Tsuchida’s friends got really mad at him, and Kimura shows up to save the day)
木村：これからは 君に
ふさわしくなれるよう努力する
だから しばらく
見守っててくれないかな
土田：うん 木村くんがそれでいいなら
土田の友達：私も 木村くんと土田さんが
それでいいなら
何も言うことはないけど
木村：そうか 分かってくれて
ありがとう
友達って いいもんだな
Kimura: I’ll do my best to become a man worthy of you.
Could you please wait for me?
Tsuchida: Well, if you’re okay with that…
Tsuchida’s friend: If the two of you are all right,
I’ve got no complaints either
Kimura: Really? Thank you for understanding! Gotta love friendship!
Toradora S01E02
(here’s an example in the negative, also with a bonus parallel example using 知る)
大河：なんで 誰も
分かってくれないんだろ
竜児：ん…
大河：私たち
こんなにグジグジ悩んでるのに…
なんで誰も**知ってくれない**んだろ
Taiga: Why doesn’t anyone understand us?
Ryuuji: [unsubbed, but in context it’s a grunt of surprise because it was kind of a hard left-turn in the conversation]
Taiga: Even when we’re so troubled, why doesn’t anyone support us?
A sample size of three is far from conclusive, but the three I happened to grab all had the more straightforward conclusion, for whatever that’s worth.
Also I hope this doesn’t come off as trying to own you with facts and logic, you comment just made me think about how I could try to understand this better and the idea of searching anime subs popped into my head! I never found individual sentence examples super helpful because they can only give you so much context, but having fully animated and voice-acted examples from series I know makes things way clearer. There’s no way I’m the first person to think of this (sure enough, I just googled it and there’s a fancy web app which will do this for you much more effectively (albeit only with audio and screenshots), but thanks for giving me the idea!
Here are two very helpful resources that are similar to that app, but for YouTube (although that’s really good and I’ve never heard of it). Youglish, which is focused on language learning, and Filmot, which is much more powerful. I would recommend narrowing down your searches if you’re going to use Filmot.
Small side note, you will find many more examples, and easier to understand ones, if you search わかる in hiragana. Using your link for example.
And you were correct with your first comment about the わからせる/わかる thing.
Thank you for sharing additional resources! Those will definitely be helpful for getting more naturalistic speech, and obviously YouTube is a practically infinite source of input. Now that you mention it, I’ve actually seen Youglish used by Dr. Geoff Lindsey (he makes wonderful videos about English phonetics if that’s your jam), but I never realized you could use it for other languages.
Is it just me, or is there a crazy amount of VTubers in the Filmot results? Not that I’m complaining (quite the opposite), but that just seems improbable; it makes sense that there will be a general bias towards streamers, since they pump out hours upon hours of dialogue-heavy video, but I can’t imagine Hololive and Nijisanji make up half the streamers on YouTube. Might just be that the default sort tends to weigh videos with more views.
I did think about using the hiragana, but I figured I had to pick one or the other and just went with the kanji. It’d be nice if I could do a regex-type search to capture both examples (like what I did with my local search), but it’s not a major hardship to have to do two separate searches and there’s only a relatively small subset of words where both the kanji and the kana form are common.
(also I love that in the three search results you showed me I was immediately presented with Ichiro my beloved, Kumiko my beloved (nice handle and profile pic btw), and Korone my beloved)
Another Kumiko enjoyer, you say? Thank you.
Yeah, I’ve seen Dr. Lindsey use it, too. Great channel. I used it for a long time when learning Japanese and it was very helpful for audio clips for studying.
As to the VTubers, I think it’s just that there are like 50 huge VTubers, who can all afford to stream almost every day, and they all yap so much that they are going to have a video that contains any even decently common word. I don’t watch VTubers that much, but I like Marine and she alone probably puts out half the dictionary in like 10 minutes. They are perfect learning material though. (Except for that cursed loud background music that would be in every audio clip you saved).
