How do i recognize passive from potential?

16 comments

1. Ya, it’s basically context.

2. Only grasp meaning in context. It is difficult but I believe you’ll be able to. がんばってください！おうえんしてます！

3. It’s usually the particle in my experience.

   に – passive : 魚に食べられる (eaten by a fish)

   が – potential : 魚が食べられる (able to eat fish)

4. context

   same way you differentiate the other thousand homophones

5. Aside from context, there are some situations where the passive and potential are considered the same thing. It’s kinda hard to explain but for some sentences if you ask some native speakers they might not even see a difference between the action being passive or potential. To give you an example with English, if you try to pull a door open and it’s locked, you can say “It won’t open” which means both “the door won’t open itself” (because it’s locked) and “I cannot open the door”.

6. It’s usually pretty obvious from context

7. As others said, context and particle are key. But another aspect is that in more casual spoken language, the potential form will often drop the ら. This isn’t done for the passive so, as result, this particular ambiguity doesn’t happens.

8. sorry im very stupid, can you give 10 examples where you could mix them up? to satisfy my curiosity

9. I’ve been living with an Au Pair for over a year now, and she literally doesn’t use ら for potential. She will say 食べられる for “eaten by” and will say 食べれる for “able to eat”.

10. The day a cake starts eating me back is the day I’ll be terrified.

11. The conjugations I was taught, for godan/ichidan, is ~える/~られる for potential, and ~あれる/~られる for passive.

    So for example 書く would translate to 書ける for potential, and 書かれる for passive. It’s easiest to determine for godan verbs, since you can tell immediately by the conjugation.

    For ~る ending godan verbs or any ichidan verbs, the conjugation is the same, so you just use context. Once you practice it enough, it becomes second nature. I wish there was a clear cut rule, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head. Both verbs use が so it can be tough identifying them at first

12. I would advice to read this short paper:

    [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253660555_On_the_meaning_of_the_Japanese_passive](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/253660555_On_the_meaning_of_the_Japanese_passive)

    It’s only 10 pages, but it explain a bit about passive form generally and how られる is used with other meanings like potential or honorifics.

13. another one I saw like twice is “poor man’s keigo” which is using passive form

14. This is where ら抜き言葉 comes in. NHK says it’s “incorrect” (they will literally hard sub in the missing ら), but it does help to distinguish the two meanings and it’s used all the time by Japanese people.

    Note that this is only a problem for 一段活用動詞 as the potential and passive form for 五段活用動詞 is distinct. Below are some examples.

    食べる

    食べられる

    食べれる

    泳ぐ

    泳げる

    泳がれる

    If they use the “correct” from then you simply have to rely on context and particles (に・が・を) as mentioned below. に is only for passive, が is for potential, and を can be used for potential (not as common as が) or for suffering passive.

15. Three things:

    * Context.
    * In some cases native speakers don’t see a difference between the different “forms” of a verb that are written and pronounced the same way, and instead there’s a general vibe that is difficult to translate to English or fully grasp as a learner.
    * There is a phenomenon called ら抜き (ra removal) which is pretty common amongst younger speakers (though usually only in casual speech) where the potential form of ichidan verbs is inflected as though it were a godan verb (so you can hear 食べれる from time to time). But this isn’t a guarantee, though it does show that sometimes Japanese people do consider the forms separate and to some younger people it makes “more sense” to inflect ichidan verbs that way.

16. Context mainly