In this lesson, you will find out all about active and passive voice in German language and how to turn active sentences into passive ones in German.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!CONTENT
What is active voice?
What is passive voice?
How to turn active sentence into passive one
All active and passive tenses
In English there are active and passive sentences, the same thing is in German language. How can we make difference between them and what are active sentences.
What is active?
In active sentences subject is the performer of the action and the object suffers the action.
In active sentences verb is in active form, for example: ich mache, du gibst, wir spielen …
What is Passive?
In passive sentences object of active sentences becomes subject of passive sentences.
In a passive sentence subjest suffers the action and the verb, predicate, is in passive form.
wird gemacht, wird gegeben, wird gespielt …
Example:
Active: Meine Oma wäscht die Wäsche.
Passive: Die Wäsche wird gewaschen.
In the first sentence the accent is on the performer of the action (Meine Oma), while in the other one, in the passive sentence the action is important, who performed the action is not important. MeineOma is the subject in the active sentence. The subject of the active sentence is simply omitted in the passive sentence.
If you ask yourself, if there is a subject in passive sentence? YES there is, die Wäsche is the subject in passive sentence and it was the object in accusativein active sentence. Die Wäsche is the subject in passive sentence, but it suffers the action, it does not perform it.
Click on:
Grammar Contents
How to turn an active sentence into a passive one
We are going to analyse two sentences in the following example. The first one is an active sentence.
For example:
Die Feuerwehr rettet die Katze. (Firefighters save the cat)
Die Feuerwehr is the subject, rettet is the predicate, eine Katze is the object in accusative.Thesame is in the sentence in English language. Firefighters is the subject,save is the predicate, the cat is the object in accusative.
When we turn active sentence into a passive one it looks like this:
Die Katze wird von der Feuerwehr gerettet. (The cat is saved by firefighters)
Die Katze is the subject(which was the object in active sentencei, wird ..gerettet is predicate , a von der Feuerwehr je prepositional phrase von + Dativ,which is used in passive sentences in German language, if we want toexpress the performer of the action. Prepositional phrase can be made by three prepositions:von+DATIVE, durch + ACCUSATIVE mit + DATIVE.
All active and passive tenses
| Active | Passive | |
| Present | Tom öffnet das Fenster. | Das Fenster wird geöffnet. |
| Past | Tom öffnete das Fenster. | Das Fenster wurde geöffnet. |
| Perfect | Tom hat die das Fenster geöffnet. | Das Fenster ist geöffnet worden. |
| Past perfect | Tom hatte die das Fenster geöffnet. | Das Fenster war geöffnet worden. |
| Future I | Tom wird das Fenster öffnen. | Das Fenster wird geöffnet werden. |
| Future II | Tom wird das Fenster geöffnet haben. | Das Fenster wird geöffnet worden sein. |
See more:
