So, you’ve been learning German for quite some time. You’ve got to grips with verb conjugations in the present tense, worked out how to form a past tense sentence and you can predict the future! Maybe not😉, but whatever future tense sentence it may be, you can say it in German!
And then you hear about the passive voice! The what?
And you think: Not again! I thought, I’d done all the tenses in German!
Luckily, the passive voice sounds worse than it is. Let me explain:
Just like in English, in German we have two voices, an active and a passive voice.
In the active voice we name the person doing an action. The object of the action is also often named. Ich have ein Auto gekauft. I have bought a car.
In the passive voice the emphasis is on the person or object who the action is done to:
Das Auto wurde gekauft. The car has been bought.
The following videos are from my online course German tenses 4 – the passive voice
You’ll see that, unlike in English, (as German has four cases) the articles might change depending on whether something is the subject or object in a sentence. So this is where your knowledge of the cases comes in. For a refresher you might like to check out my online course German grammar – the four cases
But back to the passive voice, here is the intro into the passive voice in German:
And here is a screenshot of the last image in the video with a reminder how an active sentence will change when you turn it into a passive sentence.
What else do you need for the passive voice?
You need to know how to conjugate the verb ‘werden’ in all the tenses and you need to know the past participles of the second verb.
The following video shows you how this is done in the present tense:
That wasn’t that bad, right? Try it for yourself now with the next video:
If you’d like to know more about my course, go to German tenses 4 – the passive voice and if you’re interested in buying it, use the coupon code BLOGPOST for 10% off (You can also use it for the cases course!).
