A) Causative is 外させる. Passive is 外される.

Consonant  +  あ  せ   る is causative.


B) Context. I think I asked the same question, and this was the answer I was given.

Here are some simple to understand sentences:

Passive
-[なんで日本語を勉強していますか?]とよく聞かれます
-結婚してから娘は夫に殴られた   
Aに殴られた  got hit by A
Aが殴られた  A got hit by ...(here the person who hit A is not specified)



Causative
2. -何ども言わせるな!
-質問があったら聞かせてください
-これ以上悪化させないように...
-きみにはもう厳しい思いはさせない

3. Potential
Pretty easy

-------------------
彼女の記憶が回復すれば必ず有力な手掛かりが得られるはず。
If her memory recovers, (we/I/you..) will definitely be able to gain some useful clues.

Zorlee wrote:

I'm still trying to fully grasp the passive thing though.
The main concept is that the verb happens to / effects the subject of the sentence (whether mentioned or not), right?

Pretty much.  Jay Rubin gives these three examples in his book:

1)かばんを盗んだ。
2)かばんが盗まれた。
3)かばんを盗まれた。

The first one, not passive, means "X stole the suitcase."  So, could be "He stole the suitcase," "They stole the suitcase."  People often translate this sort of sentence in their head as "The suitcase was stolen," forgetting that the suitcase is NOT the subject of this sentence, and that this sentence is talking about someone doing it.

The second, rather, is "The suitcase was stolen."  This form is used considerably less than it is in English (but has become more common since English has become so widespread in Japan).

The third is the suffering passive, what you are talking about above.  The translation is literally "X suffered the Y-stole-the-suitcase."  Rubin argues that nothing passive happened to the suitcase (hence why it's marked by を, like in the first example which is not passive).  Rather, as the first part of the verb is talking about what Y did to the suitcase, the passive part of the verb is talking about the subject X.  So, if the suitcase stolen was yours, and an unnamed group of people stole it, a good way to look at it might be "DAMN! They stole my suitcase!"  The power of this translation keeps in mind what is happening is not what is happening in number 2, in that the suitcase is not the subject.  It also keeps in mind that both the person who's suitcase was stolen and the people who stole the suitcase can be playing a part in the sentence, but both are often omitted in true Japanese fashion.  And, it conveys the fact that someone is being hurt by the fact that they stole the suitcase.

I meant to explain it clearly, but maybe I failed.

Tzadeck wrote:

I meant to explain it clearly, but maybe I failed.

Good enough for me.

Thank you guys so much!!
I love your little "formula", IceCream! And thank you for the irc-chat-write-up, Magamo is the sh*t!
But since we're on the topic of passive forms (and since we're all geeks here!), I've heard talk about two forms of the passive, the direct and indirect passive.
I read up on the passive forms (again) in a Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, and it said that the indirect passive usually includes animate agents and volitional actions. The direct is more, well direct, f.ex.: 山田さんはビルにぶたれた。

BUT - do I need to focus on this? I mean, do I need to focus on understanding the differences within the passive forms, or will I understand sentences anyway, if I just focus on nailing the passive form in general?

I want to know enough grammar to understand what I'm reading well, but I don't want to spend too much time worrying about it!

Well, I'm a bit confused about the Dictionary of Basic Japanese grammar:

This is an example sentence from the "Indirect passive form":
太郎は晴子にタバコをすわれた。

This is an ecample sentence from the "Direct passive form":
山田さんはビルにぶたれた。

I really don't see the difference. At all.
I don't think the author talks about intransitive vs. passive, since 吸う is transitive (at least according to EDICT) and passive in the above sentence.

Last edited by Zorlee (2009 December 20, 1:49 pm)

I would guess that the difference between indirect and direct is that indirect needs the を... or rather that direct can't take を. But I'm guessing here, I really haven't seen a distinction being made before.

Zorlee wrote:

This is an example sentence from the "Indirect passive form":
太郎は晴子にタバコをすわれた。

This is an example sentence from the "Direct passive form":
山田さんはビルにぶたれた。

I really don't see the difference. At all.

Think about the non-passive "equivalent" sentence. For the 'direct' passive example this is ビルは山田さんをぶった -- the subject in the passive comes from the (を-marked) direct object in the non-passive.

For the 'indirect passive' the non-passive sentence is 晴子はタバコをすった -- and 太郎 isn't present in this sentence at all.

So in a 'direct passive' sentence the subject is having the action directly done to them. In an 'indirect passive' the action is being done to something else (in this case the タバコ) and the subject of the sentence is indirectly affected by it.

As mentat_kgs says, the most important thing here is that it's clear to you who is doing the action to what.

IceCream wrote:

Sorry if i confused you with the intransitive vs. passive thing, it's probably obvious to everyone else. It just confused me because the passive tense in english and the passive tense in japanese aren't the same thing, and some of the concept of intransitive is mixed up with it.

You seem to get the hang of things without any framework, but I thought I'd offer a bit of an outline for you to hang your ideas on.   I think it's just a naming issue. What you're calling intransitives are actually indirect passives (b/c intransitive verbs can only become indirect passives). But it's worth noting that indirect passives can be use transitive verbs too.

IceCream's Outline:   3 types/uses of ～られる discussed here:

(1) Direct Passive (directly affected by action, aka "simple")

-grammatically equivalent to English passive
-transitive verbs only
-active sentence object becomes passive sentence subject: を→が  [undergoer]
-active sentence subject becomes　passive sentence dative: が→に  [agent]
[-animate subject: usually an affectee (may be from meaning of verb)
-inanimate subject: neutral, written, (some other situations), aka "二よって passive"]     

(2) Indirect Passive (only indirectly affected, aka "affective", "adversive", "suffering")

- doesn't exist in English [some are like English pseudo passive]
- more common in Japanese than simple passives
- transitive or intransitive
- agent に, object を　(if a transitive verb)
- subject usually animate, often the speaker (some poetic/metaphoric inanimate)
- animate subject indirectly "emotionally" affected by the action
- affected favorably or unfavorably

(3) Polite - just know it to recognize it and not confuse it with passive.
-it doesn't mean passive or "emotionally affected"
-it means the person is higher status/position

*   *    *    *     *
Bonus:   Indirect passive examples:
Intransitive:   
  active:               父が死んだ　         Father died.
  indirect passive:   私は父に死なれた　 Father died (and I was affected)
                                                  lit. I was died on by my father.
Transitive: (direct & indirect objects)   
  active:               彼に賞品を渡した。   (They) handed a prize to him.
  indirect passive1: 彼は賞品を渡された。 He got a prize handed to him (and he was happy)
  indirect passive2: (私は)賞品を彼に渡された。
                                      (They) handed a prize to him (and I was happy/troubled.)

  [simple passive:    賞品が彼に渡された。The prize was handed to him.]

Note:  Here 彼に　is an indirect object - "to him" b/c 渡す　has both direct and indirect objects.  (This is not the same as the に　meaning "by" someone in the earlier example.)

Also, indirect passive 2 is ambiguous. It could also mean "I was affected by him handing me a prize" (ie 彼に＝by him.)

Edit: fixed 商品ー賞品
Edit2 in [ ]: added clarifications for any future readers

Last edited by Thora (2012 March 30, 4:00 pm)

Great posts, guys! I'm learning a whole lot here!
Just a question from my side:

有名な建築家がこの劇場を設計した。ギリシャの建築様式を採り入れている。

This is a sentence from my KO2001 deck. Now, I've always looked at 採り入れる as a word, without anything fancy. But - should I look at it as a passive verb here? As in "The greek architectural style is adopted (at this theater, by the the agent?)"
Or am I making things harder for myself?

There's a lot of words, say for example 壊れる, that ends in the typical れる passive/potential ending. How do I know if its passive or just a word in itself?

Zorlee wrote:

There's a lot of words, say for example 壊れる, that ends in the typical れる passive/potential ending. How do I know if its passive or just a word in itself?

If it appears in the dictionary then it's the plain form of the verb :-)

Tobberoth wrote:

You can't expect to know if a word is just a word or passive or any other form by looking at the endings. You can only analyse a word you already know.

This is true, but it is possible to say that something is definitely *not* a passive/potential/whatever and thus narrow down the possibilities. In particular, it's a useful skill to be able to find a verb in a dictionary starting from whatever inflected form you've encountered. You might have to have a couple of guesses, of course. For instance,  採り入れている cannot be a passive form of anything, because passives end -areru, and there's no 'a' here. (It could in theory be the potential form of a hypothetical  *採り入る.) For 壊れる you can make use of the usual convention that verb inflections happen only in the okurigana, so even though it ends wareru it's not passive.

Zorlee wrote:

should I look at it as a passive verb here? As in "The greek architectural style is adopted (at this theater, by the the agent?)"

This is semantically wrong as well as "not a passive because of the form of the verb". If it were passive then you could put in a だれかに clause to indicate the agent. But in fact 採り入れる doesn't let you do that. So not only does it not look like a duck, it doesn't quack like a duck either :-)

Chill out, and absorb patterns.  I feel you're over-thinking this.  The passives would be 壊される or 壊れられる、which are different from 壊す and 壊れる--hence no problem.  Read, read, and all becomes clear.

Now, it's time for a stupidly-crazy theory:

Indirect and direct passives are exactly the same thing.  Look at these two sentences:

「ケーキが食べました。」
「ケーキを食べました。」

What's the difference?  The verb?  Is one of those active verbs suffering?  (Dunno about suffering, but I'd be worried if there were a well-fed cake on the loose.)  No, the difference is the noun function.

「ケーキが食べられました。」
「ケーキを食べられました。」

Once again, the noun function.  The trick here is that Japanese passive transitive verbs have two functions:
が：recipient of action
を：patient/theme of underlying transitive verb

Now, what's unusual about this (from the standpoint of English) is that if you start with a transitive verb with one patient and inflect it into the passive mood, you get a verb with two patients: one receives the literal action, one the figurative action.  Typically, one of these is the topic, so you don't see both at once, but with my magical Contrived Example Machine:

「間違いない、ボーブは悪魔だよ!ジムがケーキを食べられたから。」
Make no mistake: Bob's a devil!  'Cuz Jim got his cake eaten (by him).

A more reasonable example would be something like:
ー　ジムは何であそこに座って泣いている？
Why is Jim sitting over there crying?
ー　ケーキを食べられた。
Got his cake eaten.

And now, the really wild one: a suffering passive without the を:

ー　俺のケー～～～キ！
My ca~~~ke!
ー　またか？オイ、皆、ジムが食べられそうだ。今度は誰が悪いか？
Again? Hey, everybody, looks like Jim got (it) eaten.  Whose fault is it this time?

Yes?  No?  Should I just shut up?