BondLingo Learn Japanese

Mastering the passive form in Japanese Reru(れる) Rareru(Rareru) : Hey Everybody, in today’s online Japanese lesson we are going to be looking at the passive form in Japanese. Now for those of you who don’t know what the passive form is, let’s break it down for you. The passive is formed by using the verb to be + past participle. Here’s an example of a passive form sentence: My car is being washed. “My car” is the focus of the sentence. The active form would be “I am cleaning my car”. In Japanese, passive forms are more often used in articles and essays. The use of the passive form is often discouraged in English so it may take you a little while to get used to, but hang in there and you’ll master it in no time.

The passive form in Japanese Reru(れる) Rareru(Rareru)

The key to creating the passive form is all in the verbs. You will know the sentence is a passive form sentence by the ending of the verb, it will end in られるorれる. However we will come onto this in more detail in just a little while.

Firstly, lets look at some simple passive form sentences in Japanese to help us really understand what a passive form verb looks like.

パンが誰かに食べられた！

Pan ga dareka ni taberareta

The bread was eaten by somebody!

お母さんに変だと言われます。

Okaasan ni hen da to iwaremasu

I am told by my mother that (I’m) strange.

この本は多くの人に読まれている。

This book is being read by a large number of people.

As you can see in these sentences the person who commits the action in the passive form is marked by に so ensure you practice getting used to seeing and using this particle in passive sentences. So now we have a bit of an understanding of how a passive sentence looks and feels, we now need to look towards how we actually change sentences into the passive form.

The passive form in Japanese – group 1 “U Ending Verbs”

To understand this we first need to understand how to conjugate the different verb groups into the passive form.
Let’s start by looking at how to conjugate verbs from group 1 “U Ending Verbs”
The rule for conjugating group 1 verbs is: Change the last character as you would for negative verbs but attach れる instead of ない.

This is the hardest group to conjugate into the passive so make sure you write lots of your own examples and practice conjugating, getting faster and faster.

The passive form in Japanese – group 2, the Iru and Eru verbs.

Now let’s take a look at conjugating group 2, the Iru and Eru verbs. This one is much easier, phew.
All you have to do with this verb group is change theるverb ending toられる, it’s just that simple, let’s look at some of the examples below

As you can see, this group is really easy so you won’t have any problems here.

The passive form in Japanese -Group 3, Suru and Kuru.

The final verb group we need to look at conjugating into the passive before mastering this online Japanese lesson is group 3, Suru and Kuru.
Like with most conjugations of the group 3, there is no set rule, so you just have to remember it, there’s only 2 verbs in this group so don’t worry.

There we have it, you have now mastered to passive form conjugations, let’s finally take a look at some more examples to make sure we are getting it.

外国人に質問を聞かれた
 Gaikokujin ni shitsumon wo kikareta
 I was asked a question by a foreigner

友達に手紙を送られた。

Tomodachi ni tegami wo okurareta

The letter was sent by my friend  

不可能だと思われる

Fukanou da to omowareru

It is thought to be impossible

So there we have it, you now know how to identify, conjugate and create sentences in the passive form, well done! As previously mentioned, it will be hard to get used to at first as it’s quite unnatural to use the passive form often in English but hang in there and you will definitely grasp the usage.

Learn Japanese passive form with BondLingo

Recommend