Can someone help me out please? I’ve been trying to get more familiar with Causative and passive form but it still feels so vague to me. I don’t know when I would use it personally, and I struggle a lot to distinguish the difference between a standard sentence and a sentence with passive form attached. I get what it inherently means, but can someone give me some examples of sentences that are more or less the same with and without passive form so I can get a grip on what it actually does for a sentence? I feel like I hear it all the time without really knowing why it’s being used. And for causative, explanations seem a bit vague too as I guess it doesn’t always translate well to english. I’m just struggling with solid examples of how these forms can actually be utilized effectively.
2 comments
quick & dirty but …と言われる(it’s said that…) …と呼ばれる (it’s called….) are often used and easy to distinguish. 『それよく言われます。』”That’s often said (about me).”
even “often used” here is (lol) often used. (よく使われる) idk if it’ll help you but I got used to the usage by learning the common ones. sometimes there are sentences that don’t need a direct subject or sound weird with one. it doesn’t translate 1:1 with english which may be hard to wrap your head around!
Let’s first talk about passives and causatives en English.
First. You have to understand the concept of subject and object.
The cat ate the mouse
The cat = subject
The mouse = object
猫はねずみを食べました
The example above, both in English and Japanese, is said to be “active” because the subject does the action that has an effect on the object
Passive:
A passive is made by (be+past participle). So you would have:
The mouse was eaten by the cat
Now, notice that “the mouse” that was the object in the active sentence (the cat ate the mouse) is now the subject of the passive sentence. We can say that we have a “passive subject”. We know that the cat did the action of eating but we can actually leave it out of the sentence as in
The mouse was eaten.
Now, we have to understand when do we use the passive over the active.
Well, sometimes the entity that did the action is not important or is so obvious that it is not needed to be stated as in:
The thief was caught
We know he was caught by the police, but we just want to say that he has been caught.
Also, sometimes the object is more important that the entity that does the action and we might just want to emphasize it as in:
The Mona Lisa was painted in 1503.
So. In Japanese the passive works in mostly the same way. I assume you know the vwdn conjugation for passive so I won’t get into that.
Let’s see some examples:
1. ねずみが猫に食べられました
2. 泥棒は警察に捕まえられました
3.モナ・リザは1503年に書かれました
I hope this helps. I didn’t have enough time to go into the causative. But let me know if you need help with that
Sorry for terrible phone formatting