In this paper, the longitudinal speech data of six learners of Japanese were analyzed to investigate their uses of transitive-intransitive verb pairs. The data showed: 1)Uses of transitive and intransitive verbs were similar between Chinese and Korean learners. Most of the learners used one verb of the transitive - intransitive pair at the early stage of learning. 2) Learners used either the transitive or the intransitive verb of the pair, in almost similar proportion. The results suggest that the use of transitive-intransitive verb pairs depends on its general use frequency rather than its grammatical category.