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?

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.

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?

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?

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....

Last edited by PrettyKitty (2008 June 16, 11:41 am)

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. :-)

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?

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)

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.

Last edited by QuackingShoe (2008 June 16, 9:27 pm)

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.

"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...)

Last edited by PrettyKitty (2008 June 17, 10:38 am)