The new N5 points かかる and する - finding the difference impossible to grasp with the given examples

[The111]

For reference:

https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/する-cost

https://bunpro.jp/grammar_points/かかる-time-cost

I do sort of understand the difference as described in the lessons, but the examples do not all seem to fit perfectly, and they are incredibly strict about only accepting one possibility. E.g. consider these two, one from each lesson:

How are these different??? Both are describing a high price for a one day travel expense (a hotel vs a flight).

These are not the only two causing me problems. I’ve been stuck in beginner stage for these two points for many days now because the questions just seem like a crapshoot. No other N5 point has ever given me such a hard time.

And as a sidenote, a hotel that costs $44k USD per night? Really? What is up with these unbelievably high price sentences recently?

[JamesBunpro]

かかる generally focuses on how much money something takes (the “burden”) to do. する tends to focus on the actual price and is frequently used when emphasising expense.

As for the review questions being too strict, on some of the new grammar points we are yet to tidy up what answers should or shouldn’t be accepted as alternatives or bounced back. I’ll try make sure this one gets sorted as soon as possible, since this generally shouldn’t be an automatic fail. Sorry for the inconvenience on that one

[SilentRequiem]

‘Suru’ often means ‘being’ some kind of quality, such as a shape, or color. Or, in this case, a price. It’s the English equivalent of “it’ll be 10 dollars”. The focus is on the object and its value as a quality.

“Kakaru” literally means ‘to hang’. So the resource ‘hangs’ on or over the thing or action being discussed. “30 minutes ‘hangs’ over the act of going to school from my house”. The closest we have to that in English is ‘takes’, or perhaps ‘takes up’. The focus is on the resource being consumed. I sometimes visualise it like a rainbow stretching over the action. ‘Kakaru’ tells us the size of the rainbow.

Does that make sense?

[thelizard]

かかる focuses on something requiring / consuming cost, time, effort, etc
する is more like “it amounts to” a certain price

in practice there’s overlap and it’s therefore not perfectly predictable from English translation alone. You will however eventually internalize which one is natural for which case. Until then we just gotta suffer through it…

@The111

And as a sidenote, a hotel that costs $44k USD per night? Really? What is up with these unbelievably high price sentences recently?

Reminds me of that one time I was looking at a fancy Ryokan and thought “well it’s expensive but I could probably… oh wait there’s one more zero”

[ka5]

A disclaimer: the following is just my intuition and could be incorrect.

These two sentences are slightly different.
In the first sentence, the nuance is not that the speaker actually paid 7m yen, but that the room is charged at 7m yen. It leaves possibilities that the speaker paid a lower rate, stayed at company expense, or even for free by an invitation from the owner, for example.
The second sentence is about the amount of money it actually cost Atsushi.

For the second example, I don’t think you can use する and say「いくらした？」. But you can say 「いくらだった？」.

More generally, I believe する is not used when talking about how much you specifically paid for something in a transaction. It is used when describing how much something is worth/costs in general.
かかる can be used for both.

You can use かかる in the first sentence, I believe.

[The111]

Thanks all for the perspectives! One other thing I’ve noticed is that if the pattern is:

[xyz]円[__][noun]

Where:

• [xyz] is a number
• [___] is the mystery verb
• [noun] is an object whose cost is being described

And the entire phrase preceding the noun is a relative modifying clause…

In that case it feels like する is almost always the right choice. I think, because a construct shaped like that is almost always describing a physical price tag.

I also think maybe the problem is not quite as widespread in all the examples as I originally thought. I think I’ve got hung up on the plane/hotel cases specifically, because they are kind of a weird middle ground between a good and a service.

EDIT: ChatGPT says that idea above is wrong, giving me these counterexamples:

• 修理に５万円かかる車 = a car that requires ¥50,000 in repairs
• 毎年８０万円かかる大学 = a university that costs ¥800,000 per year

Another trick I think might help me: if you could picture a physical advertisement for the product in question with the price shown, then again する is probably correct. E.g. for a surgery you probably would never see such an ad. Or for university prices. Those two were also giving me a hard time. Admittedly the university prices are published somewhere, but they’re not really advertised. My Japanese partner tells me the key distinction is that your tuition is a fee, which is different than the “good” vs “service” distinction I was trying to make above (since both goods and services are priced).

[Gacee]

There is now a hint on this question when you make the mistake, but it doesn’t actually clarify why かかる is preferable in the way that others have done in this thread, it gestures at a totally different grammar nuance.

I think this could use a change.

[Fuga]

Hey @Gacee !

We have just moved this to the alternate answers, since this could work and changed the hint to ‘Although this could work here, する is used to emphasize the actual cost. We are looking for a grammar point that puts focus on the amount of time or money that was required to complete an action’!

[trig]

Writing here because I also had this confusion; see these screenshots for my frustration as both are “costs”; one was OK and the other was not OK

But, to contribute: I think I noticed a pattern and I wonder if others can confirm or contradict: する is always with a numeric price in the examples, and in English can be translated like “it is” or “it’ll run you”, whereas かかる can be used with non-numerical objects and might not translate like that. For example, in the screenshot of the question I got wrong here, the object is simply お金, “some money”; in English it would be awkward to say “It costs some money” or “it’ll run you [some] money” (granted, “It costs money” without “some” would in fact be natural), so I guess we want かかる and not する in that sentence. If it is a specified amount (number) of money for a particular thing, then する should be OK.

I think the orange text in my screenshot “That is used to say someone is ‘wearing’ or ‘[has]’” is a little misleading because obviously する can sometimes be for money cost.

[The111]

@trig

I think I noticed a pattern and I wonder if others can confirm or contradict: する is always with a numeric price in the examples, and in English can be translated like “it is” or “it’ll run you”, whereas かかる can be used with non-numerical objects and might not translate like that.

The examples I presented at the top of this thread already contradict that. They both use numbers, but only one uses する. That’s the entire reason I was so frustrated. Even more frustrating, they’re both non-physical items (i.e. services) related to travel: a hotel and a flight.

IIUC, the difference is that Japanese people view a flight as a good (with a price) but a hotel stay as a service (with a fee). It it still quite difficult for me to wrap my brain around. I wish it were as simple as just checking for the presence of a number.

[thelizard]

@trig

in this specific case, it’s not about an amount but about the general concept of money. する is never used with お金 directly, it’s always お金がかかる and never お金がする

for the other cases, する is roughly the answer to “what’s the price” and かかる is the answer to “how much money does it cost”, so just like in English, they will sometimes be interchangeable. It is what it is, and I don’t think Bunpro can fix this any better while still giving a good variety of examples. Much like the many ways of expressing obligations, you’ll have to cycle through them when both are acceptable, and avoid the cases where they’re outright wrong (such as the example above)

[The111]

So is it fair to say that if a number is not present, it will always be かかる?

But if a number is present, then in some cases both する and かかる are acceptable, but in some cases only one of them works, depending on whether the value is seen as a “price” or a “fee”?

[thelizard]

@The111

So is it fair to say that if a number is not present, it will always be かかる?

it is fair to say that if it’s about お金 or about 時間 as a concept rather than a number, then it will always be かかる when it’s about the requirement of time or money

それはお金がする would be wrong