Passive (and causative etc.) have been giving me a bit of trouble for a while now. I look at this sentence (from Tae Kim):

ポリッジが誰かに食べられた！
The porridge was eaten by somebody!

And I wonder what the difference between this is and:

ポリッジが誰かに食べた！

(Possibly changing the に with を).

A Dictionary on Basic Japanese Grammar describes passive as "to be -ed; to get -ed," but surely that's the same as a simple past tense verb, right? What's the difference? I read 'direct passive' always has an 'active' equivalent and perhaps that's what's confusing me. Why have both when they mean the same thing? Is it just to give a different nuance, and is it interchangeable?

I know a verb can be switched out with it's passive equivalent to portray a mild honorific nuance. Should I just make things easier for myself by taking every direct passive verb to mean this? Or is it not so simple?

Then there's 'indirect passive.' Apparently this one doesn't translate so well into English as direct does. I heard it carries a 'suffering' nuance to it. I think it's the afflicted is marked by は and the doer with に, and always going in that order but perhaps sometimes things can be omitted. How can you tell what type of passive a sentence is using?

And I keep getting it mixed up with causative where the rules clash a bit. This time I think the causer is marked with は and the causee with に which is pretty much backwards to the passive rule.

Blar I'm confusing myself. Anyone else have trouble with passive/causative and know a good way around it?

I did not understood your second sentence, but maybe this will help you:

Active:
I ate the apple.

Passive:
The aple was eaten by me.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I did not understood your second sentence, but maybe this will help you:

Active:
I ate the apple.

Passive:
The aple was eaten by me.

Thank you.

So what is the real difference between these two, and when do you decide to use which? Are there situations where you can only use one and not the other?

ポリッジが食べた means "The porridge ate (something)."

ポリッジが誰かに食べた！ is ungrammatical, I think.

ポリッジが誰かを食べた！ is "The porridge ate somebody." (Scary...)

The difference in passive and past more like this:
ポリッジが食べた！ The porridge ate. (Past tense)
ポリッジが食べられた！ The porridge was eaten. (Passive past tense)

Try not worrying about the に until you've sorted out the difference in 食べた and 食べられた in your mind first. It will be easier I think.

Aha thank you.

PrettyKitty Wrote:Try not worrying about the に until you've sorted out the difference in 食べた and 食べられた in your mind first. It will be easier I think.

I think that's good advice. I'll keep drilling the sentences until hopefully I have that feel.

Sometimes the passive can also contain an element of being bothered or inconvenienced by someone. For example:

誰かに私は財布を盗まれた。

It's like "My wallet was stolen by someone", but has that connotation of negativity around it. Obviously that situation is negative, but you can also take a situation that is neutral and give it that connotation.

sutebun Wrote:Sometimes the passive can also contain an element of being bothered or inconvenienced by someone. For example:

誰かに私は財布を盗まれた。

It's like "My wallet was stolen by someone", but has that connotation of negativity around it. Obviously that situation is negative, but you can also take a situation that is neutral and give it that connotation.

If this sentence was minus the added negativity, would it merely be:

誰かに私は財布を盗んだ。

That is, can the passive sometimes be completely optional?

Now you're saying you stole a wallet.

A passive sentence can be reworded to be active like this:
誰かが（私の）財布を盗んだ。

Another example:
誰かが　りんごを食べた Somebody ate the apple.
誰かに　りんごを食べられた The apple was eaten by somebody.

Same meaning, different emphasis.

Thanks everybody.

PrettyKitty Wrote:Same meaning, different emphasis.

Right I was wondering about this. Why there's two different ways to say the same thing and everything. The active goes through me a lot more naturally than the passive but I guess I'll just have to see lots of examples and get used to it.

Also,

PrettyKitty Wrote:A passive sentence can be reworded to be active like this:
誰かが（私の）財布を盗んだ。

This version would be minus the negative nuance that sutebun's sentence gave us, right? So are there times when one form is more appropriate than the other?

As for the order, just to show how not-nailed-down it is, here's an interesting sentence I mined from Final Fantasy 6:

レオ将軍が殺された。ケフカにな！

Which would translate something like...

"General Leo was killed. By Kefka!"

I think the negative nuance is caused by using を.

りんごを食べられた The apple was eaten. (and this caused me distress, that was probably the apple I was wanting to eat.... - negative nuance)
りんごが食べられた The apple was eaten. (and I am perhaps indifferent about it - no negative nuance)

財布を盗まれた。 - focus is more on this happened to me, oh no! (or whoever it happened to...)
財布が盗まれた。 - just a statement that it was stolen, maybe you care, maybe you don't.

Another sentence:
私は高田さんにパイを食べられた。
"I got my pie eaten by Takada."
Takada ate my pie (and I'm not too pleased about it).
The focus is on the event happening to 私 rather than what happened to the パイ.

This is probably just making it more confusing....

The "suffering passive" is discussed here and here:
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/forum/vie...hp?id=3269
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2005...g-passive/

Basically, it seems the idea of a "suffering passive" is over-focused on, it's not such a big grammar issue. But to understand it better you can think of the English equivalent for which examples are given at the first link:

"I was robbed of my wallet." <-- sounds more "suffering" than, "My wallet was stolen"
(In English, things are complicated to make direct objects make sense. The direct object of "steal" is the thing being stolen, while the direct object of "rob" is the victim of the theft)

"I was eaten of my cake"* (Not actually correct. In order to make this correct, you'd need an equivalent "eat" verb where the direct object is the rightful owner of the food. But this still shows the suffering example in English)

I think with something this extremely subtle (most English speakers don't consciously know about the English version), you should just learn it naturally by reading lots of Japanese. Instead of trying to learn it from a grammar book.

By the way, "suffering" does not mean "pained by" in this case. The word "suffer" can also mean just to experience/feel. You can use the "suffering" passive to say that you had all your problems solved, for example. Really, just read Tae Kim's blog post and all the comments there, it's pretty simple really. :-)

I'll also add that it doesn't always have a negative sense. It's just used more often with expressing negative things than positive things.

This page explains it pretty good too: http://homepage3.nifty.com/i-yasu/Lesson17.htm

But I think you should feel comfortable with sentences like 財布が盗まれた before thinking too much about how changing the が to a を changes the nuance. 財布を盗まれた

PrettyKitty Wrote:I'll also add that it doesn't always have a negative sense. It's just used more often with expressing negative things than positive things.

This page explains it pretty good too: http://homepage3.nifty.com/i-yasu/Lesson17.htm

But I think you should feel comfortable with sentences like 財布が盗まれた before thinking too much about how changing the が to a を changes the nuance. 財布を盗まれた

After reading this, I'm slightly confused on when to use によって。 Any clarifications?

Quote:行う動作が「書く・作る・建てる・発明する・設計する」などのように、何かを創造することを表す動詞では、多くの場合次のように「によって」が用いられます。

有名な建築家がこのビルを建てた。
このビルは有名な建築家によって建てられた。

によって is more likely to be used when saying "The book was written by..." / "The light bulb was invented by..." Something involving someone creating something.

That sentence also shows a more natural use of the passive tense.
「によって」が用いられます。 -> "Ni yotte" is used.

one example for the passive that you see fairly often is with "say" type verbs.

あのゲームが難しいと言われている。
It is said that this game is difficult. (i.e. other people are saying it, not you)

The basic reason to use a passive is because the subject is unknown, unimportant or obvious.

My wallet was stolen. (The thief is unknown.)

Toyotas are made in Japan. (The factory workers who make the cars are unimportant.)

The fire was put out quickly. (It's obvious that fires are put out by the fire brigade.)

Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin has a pretty good writeup on the passive, causative, passive-causative, suffering passive, and natural potential, among other tricky things. I found it helpful... those things are often explained outright incorrectly, especially the suffering passive (particularly as the suffering passive usually has to be translated into English active or else have the subject removed and the direct object made the new subject, as English passive sentences can't have direct objects and Japanese suffering passives can), so I recommend. Ah, and also the -te aru which has the opposite problem(active that has to be translated passive). Snispilbor's links seem to have similar information for the suffering (though Tae Kim isn't fully clear, and doesn't understand what the word 'suffering' means).

Come to think of it, I haven't heard it suggested before but "I had" comes to mind as an English version of the suffering passive. A foreign English-student was asking me about this construction before, and I was hard pressed to explain exactly what it was doing, but I essentially came to the conclusion that it had to do with 'owning' a different action, very loosely. So, "I had my wallet stolen!" It's not stellar English, and in a lot uses means something different (and active?), but it might be better than the usual workarounds or the literal "I was stolen my wallet" solutions.

Try to remember that every passive with を is a suffering passive. So 誰かに　りんごを食べられた is actually fully "(Someone) had the apple eaten by someone," "(Someone) suffered someone eating his apple," "(Someone) was ate the apple by someone." There's three items in play, the apple, the person eating the apple, and the person affected by the apple being eaten. That last person, unmentioned, is the subject of the sentence. If s/he was included, s/he would be marked with ga (ignoring wa which can go anywhere), so "私が誰かにりんごを食べられた。" On the flipside, "りんごを食べられた。" "(Someone) had the apple eaten (by someone). No matter how you slice it, there's still three items, and in all of them the unspoken 私(or whatever) is the subject. To have an accurate understanding of a sentence, it's important to keep a clear picture of how many people are involved.

Eh, two final examples. A ga passive only deals with two items, and doesn't imply anything about it happening to anyone. So, "What happened to the apple?" "りんごが食べられた。" "Why are you hungry?" "りんごを食べられた．．．"
That last there, I think you can really see why it's important to keep track of who's doing what. If you didn't quite understand the construction, and thought the apple was the subject of the sentence, you might be a little confused, since why would the apple being eaten make him hungry? Was it not enough? And why are you saying it in the passive anyway? Just say you ate the apple, you crazy backward Japanese! Well, it made him hungry because someone else ate it - and he (the subject) is 'suffering' (in this case literally) from it.

All of this is AFAIK.

Thanks a lot for your helpful responses everyone (I'll definitely go through them a second time). I just came across this sentence and am not sure if it got explained in your advice.

ナウシカに隠された宮崎駿の陰謀

(vocab translation here if you need it: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?9U )

Normally with passive I'm thinking に means something like "by" and marks the agent of an action. But I'm guessing it's not Nausicaa who concealed Hiyao Miyazaki's plot here. So perhaps it's that honorific-passive form that replaces a normal verb to convey mild respect, but then I'd think it would be が or を instead of に.

I don't really see any agent here and, while some of you have given passive example without agents, I don't think any of them are using に. Unless I'm still asleep.

There doesn't have to be an explicit agent with this tense. Think "hidden." This tense is often used like an adjective in this way. (Broken, stolen...)

I came upon this the other day: http://thejapanshop.com/home.php?cat=303

Koi Nobori uses the passive tense a lot.

Even if there's a に? What's the に doing in that sentence if it isn't marking the agent of the passive word that follows?

Also, this just came up in my SRS (from KO):

この地方の土は焼き物に使われる。

This area's soil is used for pottery.

They've translated as above, but would the literal be: 'this area's soil is used BY pottery'? That is what the general passive rule would have me believe.

"Hidden in Nausicaa"
"Used in pottery"

It's marking what it's used in/for.

に含まれている　　"is included in" (I see this one a lot...)

I think, to be hidden *in* something can also infer it's being hidden *by* that something in a way. If there is a message hidden in a picture, then the picture is technically hiding a message... Depends on how you look at it.... (just thinking out loud here... probably putting too much though into it...)

Yeah, に marks the agent of the action, or what the action happens by way of, really. I had my face kicked by way of that man. It's like he's the WAY in which you were passively verbed. に is kindof adverbial in function, I believe. What it marks usually defines HOW a verb takes place. This is probably a better way of thinking of it than the 'agent', since that could be confused with the subject, since in Active sentences the subject is the agent and a person marked with に is receiving action, but the definition of 'modifying the verb' will never change. Whether you're punching (someone) or being punched (by someone) the に tells you in what way the verb is being performed. I'm punching! Punching how? Punching by way of HIM. I'm being punched! Punched how? Punched by way of HIM! The verb is being modified with the exact same thing, but the end result is different because one of the verbs is active and one is passive.

But you're limiting your view; it also marks time, location, and does any of the other things に usually does in a sentence, which are quite a lot (though also verb-affecting). It's the catch-all post-position. I don't think it's marking the agent in either of your examples. It's doing it's usual location/purpose thing. Hayao Miyazaki's Plot (that is) hidden in Nausicaa. This area's soil is used in(for) pottery. Yeup. In both of those note that the に is still affecting how the verb is performed, but in both sentences I believe you could throw in another に to show the agent of the action(also the time, and other things), since both DO HAVE agents, they're just unspoken, and for good reason. The first one is probably just Miyazaki again, and the second one is like the generic English 'they'. There's no reason to state them. But they're still there - they always are if the verb is transitive.