The Passive (される)

First of all, a quick reminder of what we mean by the passive.

To create the passive in Japanese for all verbs with one exception, we hop two spaces left from the u-ending syllable to an a-ending syllable and add れる. The exception is う ending verbs such as 言う (to say) and 買う (to buy) where う is replaced by わ (as it was with the negative).

Grammatically, the subject performing the action is followed by に, which we can think of as meaning “by”. For certain verbs there is no passive (e.g. “to go” and “to come”) as such, but we will see the passive conjugation used for other purposes later.

For Group 2 verbs this does represent one potential issue; namely, without context the following can mean one of two things.

But as soon as we add another word it becomes clear which we mean.