Hello everyone,
And welcome to a new episode of the epic online Grammar Course. And today, we’ll talk about a topic you’ve been asking for years and that’s especially for relationships, be they personal or professional.
Passive-Aggressive Voice in German
And here’s an example:
- “Kannst du dein Geschirr in die Spülmaschine räumen?”
“Oh… klar du, kein Problem. Natürlich kann ich diese kleine Schale in den Geschirrspüler räumen, wenn die dich in dieser großen Küche stört. Soll ich auch noch Fenster putzen und die Oberflächen desinfizieren? Wie sauber brauchst du es denn? OP-Level?” - “Can you put your dirty dishes into the diswasher?”
“Oh… sure, no problem. Of course I can put this tiny bowl into the dishwasher if it bothers you so much in this huge kitchen. Should I also clean the windows and desinfect the surfaces? How clean do you need it? Surgery room grade?”
Amazing!
As you can see, it works pretty much the same in German and in English so you’re well prepared for the next argument with your partner or flatmate.
Tune in next week when we talk about how to gaslight in German.
Nah, I’m kidding of course.
The real topic of today is:
Passive Voice in German
A long requested topic and one that many people find confusing.
And after checking out what the Youtube teacho-sphere has to offer on the topic, I understand why.
Most of the videos were, well, not so good and there was also some legit garbage – full of contradictions and misleading simplications and downright falsehoods.
But Passive doesn’t have to be super complex and confusing.
I think the main thing people struggle with is the difference between Vorgangspassiv and Zustandspassiv and when to use which.
And I think I have found a great solution for it.
At first, it might feel confusing, too. But it’s confusing in a different way. A wholesome way. A Zen way. A confusion that feels like bathing in warm milk.
And then, it’ll click and you’ll be like “Wow, this is really easy.”
Well, that’s the plan at least.
Now, this whole thing is most likely going to be a three part series.
Part one will be a general look at passive, part two will be all about Vorganspassiv and Zustandspassiv and in part three, we’ll look into all the nooks and crannies and dirty back alleys of passive. You know… where the critters called Passiversatzformen live. Gross!
And I know that many of you are now wishing that we could start with part two right away.
But for this topic, I believe it’s really helpful to have “the bigger picture”.
Because if you just have “the small picture”, you’ll soon hit the frame and you have no clue what’s beyond it.
I’m quite sure, you’ll learn something new today, even if you already have a good handle on Passive in German.
Anyway, enough with the intro.
Are you ready to jump in?
Then let’s go.
And as promised, we’ll start with a really general look at what the concept of Passive actually is.
What is Passive Voice in language
In very general terms, Passive is a specific angle to express something about the world.
Let’s say some entity – and by entity I mean person or thing. I’m just too lazy to write it out all the time.
So yeah, there’s entity A and it is doing something, and this doing involves some other entity – entity B.
- I’m ordering a beer.
The entity doing something me, the action I am doing is ordering and this action involves another entity – the beer.
These are the roles in reality. And in the example above these roles are reflected in the grammatical roles the elements have in the sentence. The entity doing something is the grammatical subject (here: I) and the entity involved in the action is the grammatical object (here: a beer).
This is a pretty natural way to describe reality, but it’s not the only one. We can also switch the roles.
- A beer is being ordered by me.
The event described is the same as in the first sentence. But the beer is the the grammatical subject now, and I am a prepositional object. And this is essentially passive voice.
Putting an object of an action into the role of the grammatical subject.
Now, why would we want to do this and use Passive?
Youtubers usually say that in active, the person doing something has the focus while in Passive, the act is in focus and the entity doing it doesn’t matter.
But that’s not really true. The entity CAN matter!
- “Wait, the project is finished already?!”
“Yeah, it was finished by Maria yesterday.”
What passive REALLY is, is a different angle of looking at a situation. Like a camera angle.
And the angle we choose contributes to the overall message we convey, the story we tell.
Take these two sentences:
- The unicorn is watching the hiker. (active)
- The hiker is being watched by the unicorn. (passive)
The “plot” is the same in both sentences, but the angle is different.
The first sentence centers the scene around the unicorn. In movie terms, it could for example be an over-the-wither shot of the unicorn in the bush, with the hiker in the background.
The second sentence on the other hand centers around the hiker. The camera could be on the hiker and then slowly pan to the side to a bush where the tip of a pink blood stained horn is sticking out.
And yes, a side effect of the passive angle is that we CAN skip the acting entity. Either because we don’t know it or because we don’t want to specify it.
- Someone slashed the tires of the hiker. (Active)
- The tires of the hiker’s car were slashed (by someone).
(Passive… “by someone” is skipped because it’s not helping anyway.)
Or if we just don’t want to specify it.
- Someone needs to empty the dishwasher. (active)
- The dishwasher needs to be emptied. (passive)
So… in general terms, Passive is about changing the angle you use to describe an event, and on a more structural level, it is about putting something into the role of grammatical subject that is in reality an “object” of the ongoing action.
And I think most, if not all languages have SOME way to express such an angle change.
How this done varies from language to language of course. Some use helper verbs, some use suffixes or other markings.
But languages also vary in what you can actually DO with the Passive Voice.
English for instance has quite a few surprising ways with the Passive that other languages don’t have.
We’ll talk more about this in part 3, but to give you an example, in English you can form put the indirect object into the role of a subject.
- I (subject) give a book (direct object) to you (indirect object).
- You (subject) are given a book (direct object) by me.
This would not work in German and German in turn also has some passive phrasings that are downright absurd.
But look at that in detail in part threee.
First, we need to know the normal passive. And before we get to the German side, let’s now take a quick look at English.
Trust me!!
I’m going somewhere with that!
Passive Voice in English
The main way to form a Passive in English is by using the helper to be combined with the past participle of the actual verb.
- The hiker is watched by the unicorn.
This can of course come in all kinds of tenses and modes, but at the core, it’s always to be plus that participle.
- The hiker is being watched….
- The hiker has been watched….
- The hiker was watched….
- The hiker would be watched…
- …
Now, besides this be-passive, there’s actually a second important way to form a passive and that using the verb to get; again combined with that same participle. .
- The kitchen gets cleaned by Thomas.
- The kitchen is getting cleaned…
- The kitchen would get cleaned…
- ….
This get-passive originates from the idea of “reaching a destination” that to get has.
- How did you get here?
- I‘m getting fit.
And we see the same logic in the get-passive. If the kitchen “gets cleaned” it is reaching the state of “clean(ed)”. So this phrasing makes perfect sense and it’s actually going to be really helpful for German passive.
But what’s the difference between the be-passive and the get-passive?
Well, one difference is certainly the more colloquial tone of the get-passive.
But there’s also at least a potential difference in meaning, because the get-passive is by nature about “development toward a goal” while the be-passive has more of a focus on a state.
There is huge overlap between the two, of course, especially once you include the aspects and tenses, like here:
- Your order was being processed.
- Your order was getting processed.**
**multiple people in the comments have since told me that this example in particular is not idiomatic with “get”. I am leaving it anyway, so the discussion in the comments makes more sense, but here’s another one:
- In the second half, the team was virtually being/getting destroyed.
I don’t think there’s a significant difference here.
But in other contexts, there can be.
Take these two sentences:
- The park was filled with trash.
- The park got filled with trash.
Can you feel the difference here?
The second example is clearly about the act of trashing. Like… we can visualize groups of people dropping cans, plastic bags and Youtube videos on Passive there.
This visual would also fit with the first version, but the first version can ALSO be just us describing what we saw when we entered the park.
As usual with functional analysis, really great way to capture distinctions is by expressing them as questions.
And here, the two questions that represent the concepts are:
- How was the park? (A description)
- What was done to the park? (Question for event)
The sentence “It was filled with trash.” works as an answer for both.
The sentence “It got filled with trash” only really works for the second question. And that’s because the get-passive has this innate notion of an “development”. Or we could say “becoming”.
Are you still with me?
You’re probably wondering where I am going with this.
Well… what we just did will actually help us to spot a passive.
Because before we can worry about how to build it in German, we first need to know when we’re actually dealing with one.
How to spot Passive Voice (for German)
Take this sentence:
- The park is huge.
I think you’d all intuitively say that this is not a passive.
It’s just a normal description of the park. And as such it is a fine answer to “How is the park?” but it’s not really a fitting answer to “What is done to the park.”
Now take this one:
- The park is full of trash.
Same thing, pretty much, right? Sure, neither the park nor the trash are the reason why it’s there, but that’s not the point here. The sentence doesn’t “feel” like a passive. It’s just a description and it a great answer to “How?” but not so much to “What is done”
And now what about this one:
- The park is filled with trash.
This is awefully similar to the one before and I think intuitively, we’d all hear it as a description, an answer to “How’s the park?”.
But if we test the other question, it also works.
“What is done to the park?”
“It is filled with trash.”
You might have trouble “feeling” it, but all we need is a proper contexts. Like a guide on how to get rid of the inner city unicorns.
First, all people are evacuated from the park.
Then, the park is filled with trash, which will attract the unicorns.
Once they show up, they’re caught in big nets.
And now this DOES feel more like a passive, right? When you want to visualize it, you picture dump trucks pouring garbage all over the lawn.
The key point I want to make here is this:
If we have a Passive or not depends on the CONTEXT.
You can NOT always tell by the phrasing. And the line is blurry.
- The picture was blue.
- The picture was not finished.
- The picture was finished.
- The picture was being finished.
The first one is 100% not a passive, the last one feels a lot like it is one.
But the ones in the middle … well… you might have some doubts there and that’s because IT DEPENDS. They can go either way.
And a good test is to find out is the question test we already had.
- How is/was [entity]?
- What is/was done to [entity]?
If your sentence answers the first one, then we can consider it not a passive.
If it answers the second one, then it IS a passive.
And if it works for both, then you need to look at the context.
- The picture was blue.
(Only answers to “how?” – NO passive) - The picture was not finished.
(Leans toward “How?” but we can make the other one work, too) - The picture was finished.
(Works for both questions, so we need context.) - The picture was being finished.
(Sounds weird as an answer to “How?” but well for the other one, so …. Passive)
We can even simplify it and just check if the question “What is done to [ ]?” works and if yes, then it’s a passive.
That’ll then also cover the get-passive.
- The bike is getting rusty.
- The bike is getting repaired.
Only the second sentence answers to “What is done to the bike?” so that’s a passive, the first one is not.
Works really quite well, but beyond this question, I think the ultimate best guide to spotting a passive is… your gut!!
Trust your gut.
If something feels like a passive, it probably is one.
And if it doesn’t, then it probably isn’t.
This is not a linguistically sound analysis of course, but that’s not what we’re here for.
We just want to learn the Passive in German.
And for that, all we just did will be REALLY helpful, and it allows us to take a really elegant solution for the Vorgangspassive vs Zustandspassiv stuff. You’ll love it!
And what that solution is, is what we’ll find out in the second part in a few weeks.
Yeah, cliffhangers suck :)
But seriously, we’ve done enough for today and I think we need some time to let it settle.
And discuss it in the comments, of course.
Seriously, if you have any questions or thoughts about what we’ve done so far, or if you want to speculate a bit how that relates to passive in German, leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it, have a great week and I’ll see you next time!
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This question arises from a headline in a newsletter from a Swiss newspaper: “Niemand hat es kommen sehen.” The meaning is obvious and natural, so it took several minutes before I wondered, Whoa/woah! What’s that “kommen sehen” structure, and what are other ways it may appear? Is it particular to “sehen” – what other verbs might fit the pattern? I couldn’t find an article addressing this, and thought an ersatz passive was the closest topic I could find. I see that “kommen” is more gerund-ish (an English ersatz noun), but can’t get farther than that.
It’s kind of a niche “rule” that doesn’t get much attention. I do mention it briefly in the article on zu vs um zu.:
https://yourdailygerman.com/zu-or-um-zu-when-which/#connecting-verbs-when-to-use-nothing
Verbs of perception go without “zu” when they’re used in a context of “perceiving” someone doing something. Pretty much only “sehen” and “hören”.
– Ich sehe dich spielen.
– Ich habe dich singen hören.
And then the next question is of course why “habe singen hoeren” and not “habe singen gehört”.
The former follows the pattern of three verbs (helper+modal+normal) where no ge-form is used
– Ich habe gestern nicht kommen können.
This is also a niche rule. I talk about it in the series about conditional because it’s most relevant there.
With sehen and hoere, you can find either version in the wild, but the one without ge-form sounds more elegant and is the proper choice.
Exquisitely helpful! I figured you’d have covered it somewhere, and it really is something that comes quite naturally, but so naturally that I did the double-take later. I appreciate the analysis and the link. Viel merci.
Very helpful indeed!
The hedgehog at the beginning is cute but the caption is cuter. I see gelernt can be used as an adjective in German as learned can be in English. So I suppose the hedgehog is not using passive voice. If he were, he would say “well-taught” or “well-educated”. You may not know that when learned is used as an adjective, it is pronounced with two syllables “ler-Ned”. As past tense, it is pronounced with one syllable “lernd”. Also, how can a hedgehog be learned if, as the saying goes, he only knows one big thing?
Yours truly, Herr Pedantic
Wow, I never saw this comment until now :).
Yes, “gelernt” here is not an adjective but a participle.
The hedgehog talks about what he wants to be done with him, not how he wants to be.
The hedgehog is basically Passive Voice in German. Looks stingy, but is really cute and just wants you to learn it.
This is very, very helpful. The “What is being done to . . . ” question really helps. Thanks!
Super, freut mich!
wait… can you actually create an article on how to sound passive aggressive in german because that’s fire. Or like general ways/phrases that make one sound more german?
I think this is something contextual and also lives from tone of voice. I don’t think there are specific phrasings for it that would be unique to German.
If you can make something sound passive aggressive in English, that’ll sound the same in German in the same context.
Like irony for instance.
– Clean the kitchen!
– Yeah, I only have two projects to finish till tomorrow, so I totally have time for that.
Ich liebe diese Idee!
Hey Emmanuel, me again. There’s no “done” button on the page today! Thanks!
Added it now. Thanks!
Thank you!
I am team “get” for the sentence above. “The order was getting processed when the power went out”. Das geht! My car is getting fixed right now. She’s getting her hair done. I can hear that this probably plays more in the southern US where I am from (from which I come…sigh). I can see how this would be nails on the chalkboard to British English speakers. That said, you can get a lot in the south (any state that I-10 runs though), and getting your food delivery payment processed online is something that can be “gotten”… gegotten for southern Germany :) (that was a joke)
I’m trying to access part 2 of the PassiveVoice series. I keep getting something about the use of ‘finden’. It’s interesting, but I’d like to find the Part 2 for the Passive (Part 1 really good). Am I doing something wrong?
Oh my bad. I worked on that grammar archive today, and I messed up the links.
Here it is:
https://yourdailygerman.com/vorgangspassiv-zustandspassiv-difference/
Couple of thoughts, and I apologise if someone in the comments has brought these up already. First though, great article and approach to this topic; looking forward to part 2!
I reckon someone might disagree on point 1, but definitely not on point 2! That’s all :)
Great points.
The example with “order” was already discussed in the comments, but I have added a disclaimer now in the article.
Interesting point about “a passive”.
I am using this a lot in part two and I really do not want to use “passive construction” every time. Do you think it might work with a disclaimer in the beginning that I am going to use “Passive” as a noun? Or does it sound too weird to English speaking ears?
It occurs to me that ‘passive voice’ and ‘active voice’ come to mind as I seem to remember from my youth. This is from before I thought or knew English had any structure before I learned Latin. So probably passive is an adjective. It is unfortunate that in English we don’t create new nouns by omitting the space or replace it with a hyphen so it becomes definitely a noun ‘passivevoice or passive-voice’ perhaps.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point about “a passive.” I just had a discussion about that at work, how “the software” is totally fine, but “a software” sounds incomplete. It’s the same thing with “the passive” and “a passive.”
I see 15 results for “a passive” in the article. For most of those, you could just say “the passive.” Some of them you’d have to tweak a little differently:
apassive.like apassive.apassive, the last one feels a lot like it isone.Yes, as @coleussanctus says, you could certainly move to the definite article and it would sound less weird to the anglophone ear. In this usage, it’s derivative of the fuller phrase: “the passive voice”, which we shorten a lot to “the passive” as a noun and “x is passive” as an adjective. As per the bullet point examples above, most of the time you’ll probably go with the adjectival usage, I think.
No idea when this was written, but count me as disagreeing on both points. “Being processed,” “being painted,” “being located” (as in lost luggage – looking at you, ORD) are far more likely then “getting processed” etc. but “getting” in that sense is not unusual or awkward – at least in most of the US. This might be regional or US v. UK.
My English is largely formed based on US English so that makes sense that I picked it up there.
Thema: Schmutzfinken, Haseneier. und Einhörner Äpfeln sans Pinkeln !
Oder : Auchtung ! Hier wird es erfasst und bestraft!
Beziehungsweise
GESTÄNK WIRD GETANKT.
Nachdem ich diesen ausführlichen aktiven Kampf um die Passiven Parkabfälle durchgeschlagen habe , WURDE mir total zerfetzt! Alles ist doch ganz schön sauber gemacht worden.
7.5.24
Oh, du bist hier aber lange nicht mehr gesehen worden :). Wieder da, und kreativ, wie eh und je!!
Great article! I also want to thank Emanuel and all the members who made scholarships possible. Right now I cannot afford to pay for a membership myself, but your kindness has made it possible for me to enjoy this excellent content :-)
Hi Emanuel! Do we have a second part already? looking forward to it. I am studying for my B1 test. Are there any sections of your website in particularly that you can 100% recommend to me?
Part two is not ready yet, but any module in the grammar section might be helpful. Also, you can check out the article on “werden”. There’s a bit on passive in there.
When’s the test going to be?
Its going to be in November probably, I did some courses in the past but I feel like i do better learning and reading on my own. I got pretty tired of doing courses x.x I find your website amazing! <3
Will check the werden
Plenty of time then to prepare :). Viel Spaß!!
Netter Artikel, ich kann mir schon vorstellen wohin du dem “get” passive gehst… Freue mich auf dem nächsten!
Haha, ganz genau :)
I’m sorry, Emanuel. I always appreciate your analyses and lessons, but this one doesn’t ring true to me, a native American English speaker. I haven’t had difficulties with German passives so far (almost B2), and this doesn’t help either my English or my German usage. I think we were taught in English classes in my ancient childhood that the passive is used when the entity is/has/will be “acted upon”, with the fuzzy line between adjective “finished” and passive-voice “finished” pretty much taken for granted. Generally, the adjective describes a static state; while, ironically, the passive voice whispers about the action (by someone/something else). Diagramming sentences shows the distinction graphically…but I haven’t diagrammed a sentence in 55 years.
Although again NOT a native English speaker, German does make that constant distinction between “stativ” vs.”aktiv” Passiv, for example the differences between “Der Fruehstueckstisch ist gedeckt.” = The breakfast table is set, as opposed to “Der Fruehstueckstisch wurde gedeckt.” = The breakfast table was set.
To me, the first sentence in German indicates that the table was or had been laid at some indeterminate point, probably in the recent past. However, the second sentence to my German ears shows that the table was laid just now or within a brief period prior to noticing that it’s already been laid.
I hope this makes sense:-)
I think (and I’m not a native speaker of English, so this comes from “GrainOfSaltington Hills”, but
– The table was set.
can be either… a description of what was there, and a description of what was happening.
The problem with viewing “Der Tisch ist gedeckt.” as a passive, in my opinion, is that it falls apart if you add a comparison or adverbial.
– Der Tisch ist oft gedeckt.
– The table was set.
can be either… a description of what was there, and a description of what was happening.
You are correct.
Der Tisch ist oft gedeckt.
So , maybe I am getting ahead of myself, but I feel understanding this might be the key to me understanding the whole thing.
So to my english way of thinking “Der Tisch ist oft gedeckt” sounds like it could mean “The table is often in a state of setness” – like, I pass by the table regularly and notice its regularly in that state. “setness” is not a proper word, but it allows me to avoid “is” .
To be honest “Der Tisch ist oft gedeckt” kind of also sounds like “the table gets set often” i.e. someone is setting it, but I think this is probably my english way of thinking getting projected onto german – so I guess “the table gets set often” would be using “wird”.
Either way there is the implication that there is somehow an ongoing process happening in the background of setting and unsetting the table, so a hard distinction between a state and a process can seem elusive to me….
So to me “Der Tisch ist oft gedeckt” leans HEAVILY toward bein in a state of setness.
Because German DOES have the werden passive as a normal high register option, so an author who wants to stress the act of setting would just use that. Like… why would someone forego the perfect choice just to risk being misunderstood. Zustandspassiv really is a scam.
I think “The table is often set.” lives between the two German options, leaning more toward the act, but that’s partially because it’s in present tense. In past tense it shifts more toward the middle (to my non native perception anyway).
My main problem with Passive and how it’s taught is the idiotic “Vorgangspassiv” vs “Zustandspassiv” distinction.
because there’s the same fuzzy line as the one you mentioned, but even fuzzier and that just really trips up leaners a lot.
Curious what you’ll think of part two :)
Exactly. Such is all too rarely covered adequately in most traditional US textbooks I’ve seen, whereas German grammars tend to focus in depth on this topic. I believe it’s that sadly all too many American-born instructors figure that their students won’t be sticking with German for long and so expectations for learning success are lower than in certain other languages, for example Russian.
Or maybe it’s simply the old saw “Germans all speak English!”, rearing its ugly head again.
Most informative this discussion! However, as a German native speaker, I maintain that we use the Passiv in German far more frequently than in English, although perhaps I’m mistaken.
Forgive a momentary detour here, but standard, indeed stock, utterances in German. e.g “Jetzt wird gearbeitet.” etc. could only be rendered as active in English. “We’re working right now.” would be the only possible translation , whereas in German, the Passiv works just fine.
Your thoughts on this?
I’m guessing we’ll get to those expressions in the next couple of installments, but you’re right that German passive works or is preferable quite a bit more often than English passive, especially in those impersonal kind of expressions.
They’re often crazy hard to translate, too. You’d absolutely have to find a workaround for “Jetzt wird gearbeitet” – could be “we’re working right now,” or maybe “it’s time to work [or “be working”] now.” “Work is being done right now” is grammatical enough, but it’s not what that sentence is doing in German, and it sounds so completely vague and disconnected from any particular situation as to be kind of ridiculous:
Somewhere in the world, work is being done right now.
Quite right!
Even though my second language, I usually translate English active voice from German Passiv, e.g. “Wird gemacht!” = Will do!
etc.
Yeah, these are for part three… the dirty back alleys.
translating passiv from german and is an interesting topic. Actually i put your sentence into DeepL and it suggested “work is underway”..
I think this is actually a pretty good suggestion. it keeps some of the impersonalness of the german, although “work” does become the subject in the sentence whereas in the german its the “implied” es.
I feel while this instance seems to be translatable while retaining some its impersonallness,there’s definitely similar forms you’d struggle to translate without loosing something
Another feature of translating passiv is there often seems to be a temporal ambiguity in the german (perhaps in your example this isn’t the case as we have “jetzt”)
As far as i understand it something like “es wird verkauft” could mean
“It will get sold” (refering to the future), or “sales are underway” (the present). Also , “selling will take place”
Oh, I like “Work is underway”! Only in English, to my ears this sounds rather formal, whereas the German is more common.
Again though, I come back here to ” ‘Wird gemacht!” = Will do!,
On it! or any number of other such formulae. In German, I could just as easily say, “Ja, mache ich!” and sound completely natural as well as correct:-)
Definitely going to remember “wird gemacht” can mean will do, a useful one to know… I’m now wondering if there are other common idiomatic phrases using passiv, perhaps we get these in the upcoming installments..
We also can say “Ja, mache ich!” as mentioned before, however, both work sound equally natural. Perhaps though “Es wird gemacht!” is a slightly more formal register.
With “es” I’d say it’s definitely more formal. Quite formal, actually. “Wird gemacht” is the colloquial version, at least in the Berlin region.
That’s right. I grew up in Berlin and it’s definitely a more localized usage. Remember once I was visiting friends in Austria and came out with some of my Berlinerisms. My Viennese colleagues looked at me as though I had two heads LOL
I got a “Wird gemacht!” recently in an email from a friend who’s (I believe) originally from around Bielefeld, somewhere around there. So maybe generally northern-ish?
Nah, that’d need to be part 4, but I can’t really think of many right now. On the other hand, I’m in Iceland, so I’m distracted :D
Iceland? Nice! Viel Spaß!
Oh, wow! Talar du izlendsku?
(Sorry about the faulty diacritics LOL)
No, but I think I understood this:
– talar
This is probably a cognate of “to tell” which I would assume then means “to speak” :)
Spot on! Same as in the other three Scandinavian languages, only Icelandic is exponentially more complicated:-)
I’m glad you posted this. As a native English speaker learning German (in Germany), I have encountered the phrase “Jetzt wird gearbeitet” many times. It always breaks my brain!
Also, as for the more common passive usage in German — that’s interesting. When my tutor first covered the passive with me, I was a bit resistant, owing to how in English, if you work in a writing profession and really care about the fluidity and comprehension of your writing, you’ll look to avoid using the passive voice at all costs. (I am in such a profession.) Yes, it has its uses and it can be poetic at times, but on the whole it is more often evasive (as when politicians use it) or just unclear (as when students trying to sound smart in essays use it).
When my tutor pushed back to try convincing me how important the passive is in German, I was somewhat sceptical. But what you’ve indicated here is that it can broaden the range of things you can express, really (or, to stick closer to Emanuel’s metaphor, the range of angles you can view things from). That’s very interesting to me. Especially since a lot of the worst English-language writers (in my view) are those so inspired by “continental” philosophers; I wonder if the passive usage comes so much more naturally to a writer, even in English, if such a writer is also reading sources in an original language (such as German) where the passive has this broadening and natural quality to it.
So one thing that I remember from writing my master’s thesis is that you’re supposed to make it sounds a neutral as possible, so there, a lot of passive voice would get used (instead of writing “I used a lot of passive voice”).
It does tend to sound dry and stiff and boring in German too, and people do use it to evade “I”-statements.
– Es wird wieder viel neuen Content auf diesem Kanal geben.
That’s usually a great indicator that there will NOT be a lot of new content on that Youtube channel. At least that’s my observation. People who use “passive” or “man” when they mean “I” are distancing themselves from their statements to an extent.
Right, but that’s heavily dependent upon subject matter. In the anglophone academic world, e.g., the natural sciences and fields like law expect students to use the passive voice. Unfortunately, in school as well, children learn that this is somehow more proper–that ultimately we should be trying to remove the author from the content as though it renders it less biased, more neutral, more objective. (This makes marking first-year undergraduate papers often a massive chore, but I digress…)
Other subjects, such as philosophy (in the analytic tradition), ethnography/anthropology, history, geography, and so on (in short, many of the humanities and some of the social sciences) have encouraged the exact opposite: impactful and clear writing should use the active voice wherever possible. I think there is good reason for this, which is not merely stylistic:
I apologise for the rant but I hope it is of some interest!
I think I agree.
If a person does proper research, it doesn’t matter whether they describe what they did in the lab using “I measure X” or “X was measured”. I got criticized for my master’s thesis with the claim that it was “a bit too journalistic at times”, just because I made a tiny joke here and there. Ironically, what they liked best about it though was the conclusion where I described MY experience with the project and the problems or science and art trying to work together. That was like a “dear diary” thing, but they liked it so they didn’t mind the tone I guess.
By the way…. I HATE nominalization and I think English is especially bad with this. That’s something I like about German that at least in spoken, using verbs as verbs is king. Not some stiff gerund.
“Using verbs as verbs” doesn’t sound stiff at all :). But calling it a gerund does. (Who came up with these grammar terms, anyway?)
Seriously though, I don’t think it sounds weird to use gerunds in English. Sometimes they’re pretty much unavoidable:
– Hiking is fun.
It depends a lot on the situation, but I think using a “real” noun can sound way worse:
– The use of verbs as verbs doesn’t sound stiff at all. (nope, nuh uh, make it stop)
Funny thing is, gerunds don’t really feel noun-y to me. I think it’s because they look and sound like the present continuous. And that feels super duper verb-y.
I guess it’s probably the opposite for something like this:
– Das Früh-Aufstehen hat sich gelohnt.
Does that feel like a verb to you? Or maybe just stiff city?
It’s not the use of gerunds per say, but English writing has a penchant to overdo it.
– Walking along the beach, sipping her cocktail, Maria checked her phone, hoping to see Thomas apologize via Whatsapp.
Not the best example, but that’s how English often feels to me. Only one of the four things she does (walk, sip, check, hope) is phrased in active voice, the rest is just a bunch of “extended adjectives” to me.
– Das Früh-Aufstehen…
This is Stiffington Hills. Like a wooden box. And that’s how gerunds feel to me, too.
But I guess it’s because many of them would be actual nouns in German, so what I feel is the vibe of the translation, and not that verb-y vibe of the “continuous” that you feel.
Yeah, that sounds kind of like a tacky novel to me. Those are adjectives (participles) and it’s easy to overdo it with them.
They feel different than gerunds. It takes more work to understand the sentence, and it feels like the meaning is diluted somehow.
These two sentences feel totally normal to me. I don’t have any trouble picturing the action:
– Going to the opera is a real drag.
– I like walking barefoot in the sand.
This one feels like it’s trying too hard, and it doesn’t pack a punch:
– Walking barefoot in the sand, I thought about the meaning of life.
Ah, yeah I’m quite shaky when it comes to identifying an actual gerund (I also don’t really try, to be honest).
I think part of what I don’t like about an example like this…
– Going to the opera is a real drag.
…is the fact that my brain doesn’t really know what it’s looking at until I get to “is”. Like, the sentence could also start with this adjective version. It’s unclear whether what I am reading is something someone does in the sentence, or whether it’s just a noun. Do you feel this ambiguitiy at all?
I have to say as a native English speaker who hasn’t reflected specifically on gerunds and present participles, and how they might overlap for a learner, I had never encountered the idea that this use of language could be ambiguous. Maybe it is just the extreme familiarity I have with using the language that blinds me to it. I have to say, though, that gerunds are unavoidable and essential in even everyday colloquial chat.
I think the ambiguity doesn’t at least strike me as very pressing in the above example, because to begin a sentence with a participle phrase like that one would be pretty literary:
More likely we would just say something like:
You’d probably encounter it more often (even in literary usages) where its adjectival role is more immediately obvious because following a subject and interjecting a sentence:
There’s no real question there of it being a gerund. Whereas,
This is automatically something I read expecting it to be a gerund (unconsciously of course, because this usage is so engrained and normal in English; you learn it as a young child).
If I heard someone say that, I would expect a whole chunk of words that fits this pattern:
– Going to __ is __ (fun, boring, whatever).
It’s common enough that you can pretty much guess what’s coming. Maybe kind of like how native German speakers can guess what verb (or prefix) is coming at the end of the sentence.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the adjective version in conversations. I don’t go around thinking about whether it’s an adjective or not. But a pattern like this:
– Going to the opera, I tripped and fell.
That’s something you only find in writing. If you said it out loud, there would be a noticeable pause where the comma is. You don’t have that in the first example. The stress and rhythm would be different too.
Those are the kinds of ingrained things that help you figure out what’s coming. When I read something that sounds like spoken language, I expect the same patterns.
Now if someone wrote the second example and didn’t put a comma, I would probably have to read it twice.
Oh, I was only referring to English writing and particularly, newspaper writing and some shitty prose. And as soon as the “is” comes (or the subject), it’s clear what it is of course.
I never felt like all the -ing-forms are too much in spoken, but I did feel that way when reading.
Interesting bit about the comma there. That explains why it seems to be so hard for English speakers to not use that position 1 comma.
– Heute, habe ich ….
This looks sooo weird to be, but I guess it’s kind of hardwired into the brains of English speakers
I hadn’t thought about why I don’t like to read some news articles. I pulled a few up just now, and the one I noped out of was full of participles.
The pause in English, that might have to do with the word order. The subject really likes to come first, so if you shove something in front of it, the pause kind of helps you keep things straight.
I think I forgot to answer this. If we stick with this example:
– Going to the opera is a real drag.
The part in bold feels like an action. Like, oh yeah, going to the opera, that’s something you can do. If I sit here and look at the sentence, I can tell it’s a noun, but I don’t really feel it.
This type of thing usually comes with a fairly “empty” verb:
– Going to the opera is a real drag.
– Going to the opera can be kind of fun.
– Going to the opera, bleh. Who would wanna do that?
So it doesn’t feel like there’s a clash between the verbs or anything. It just kind of is the action.
I guess it’s like the colloquial infinitive in German:
– In die Oper gehen ist verschwendete Lebenszeit.
I honestly don’t know what the convention is here. Technically, it’s a noun, but we cannot compound all that and it looks really weird with hyphens, so I’d say most people would write it as a verb.
What about this though:
– All the going to the opera ruined my vacation.
Is that idiomatic? And does it still feel verb-y despite the article?
In German, the article changes everything.
– Backen ist langweilig. (feels verbish)
– Das Backen ist langweilig. (feels nounish)
– All the going to the opera ruined my vacation.
That’s a little too long to be idiomatic. Usually it’s a shorter chunk of words like
– All this dancing is making me hungry.
– All this running around is catching up to me.
– All that screeching really got on my nerves.
But you could maaaaybe make it work if you did something like this:
– All that going to the opera, ugh. That really killed the vacation for me.
That does feel like a noun. There’s a little bit of an actiony feeling hanging out in the background, but not very much.
Hi
– Going to the opera is a real drag.
…is the fact that my brain doesn’t really know what it’s looking at until I get to “is”.
Given that German can put all 48 verbs (ok, 2 or 3) at the very END of the sentence, it is amusing you are objecting to this!
“All the going to the opera ruined my vacation.”
Perfectly colloquial way to express it.
The kitchen is getting cleaned…(By Thomas). Passive
Vs
the bike is getting rusty.
Not passive, I gather as there is no entity doing it to the poor neglected bike.
What if we say
The bike is getting rusty by the/due to the action of water vapor in the atmosphere.
Ich habe keine Ahnung. Meine Ahnung von Grammatik war nie groB, und ist jetzt kleiner
Guten Tag Emanuel! Thanks for this, took a lot of notes to remember your wonderfully clear explanations! I have two questions for you. First, my percentage of work never shows, although I have to say that I can’t follow your platform every day, so maybe that’s the reason why, and in itself not really important, but I’d be glad to know and secondly, I would appreciate if you would suggest which areas to focus on, as I’m only been re-learning German for over a year. Should I focus on grammar, vocabulary, or a bit of everything like I’m doing now? I do want to get better and I love the way you explain things! Have a wonderful day! Thanks again! Louise
I really cannot express how grateful I am to everyone who made it possible for me to be a part of this website’s membership through the sponsorship. Thank you Emmanuel, and every person helping behind the scenes.
Yeah, and using the passive can be a great tool when you want to really highlight something or point fingers.
– The cover-up was ordered by the highest levels of the government.
It sets the scene like German likes to do. You have
– The cover-up (the thing we’re talking about)
– was ordered (the action, what happened)
– and the big revelation (ta-da! we finally know who did it)
It doesn’t pack the same punch to say
– The highest levels of government ordered the cover-up.
Great example for a passive used for emphasis/narrative effect.
German Learning Youtube is missing out!
On a slightly different note, I feel like the Youtube search has made it a lot harder to find good stuff. You always had to sift some, but now it seems like there’s a lot more clickbait and totally unrelated videos.
I don’t really feel much of a punch here for some reason:
Maybe it’s because of “yesterday.” I think I’d tend to put that before Maria.
– Yeah, it just got done yesterday, by Maria of all people. (She’s normally incompetent, but this time she came through.)
– Yeah, it was just finished yesterday. By Maria, not by the team in charge. They were just goofing around, so she jumped in and got it done.
I’ve spoken English as a native for 81 years, and never realised* there is a “getting” passive! Many thanks – my life just got better.
As a beginner and native English speaker, I appreciate your efforts in describing how things work in English so I can get my head around what the heck you are talking about in German. This one was particularly well presented. When I can relate, I can remember. Thanks! :)
I’m really happy to hear that, vielen Dank!!
Hi Emmanuel!
I would not personally have thought that there is a “getting” form of the passive but rather it’s just another and very common English translation of werden. Eg Active: Er wird älter. He’s getting (becoming) older. Passive: Die Küche wird geputzt. The kitchen is getting (being) cleaned.
The simple direct meaning of “to get” is to fetch or receive something and could be bekommen, kriegen, or (ab)holen etc in German.
However “get” is really a multi-purpose word substitute in English which is best translated into German by using another more precise word. I’ve collected a long list of such diverse examples, often commands or requests. Eg Steh auf! Get up! Kapiert? Got it? Gute Besserung! Get well! Lass dir die Haare schneiden! ! Get your hair cut! Wie kommt man dorthin? How do I get there? BTW I once gave the list to an Austrian English class and “got them” (=asked them) to put into German.
“to get” is indeed incredibly versatile, with the core idea being “reaching/meeting”.
I’m no expert in English linguistics, but I’m pretty sure they classify “get getting” as a passive.
And yes, it is a translation of “werden”. Maybe even the closer one than “being done”. But for classification in English, it doesn’t matter what it is in a different language.
(Not sure if I’m making sense :)
I agree that the passive with “get” is pretty standard in English (and super-common in “ordinary” speech, if somewhat less so in the high-falutin’ variety). “They’re getting married”/”Be careful, or you’ll get yourself killed!”/”Grr, that trail of blood is so damning: I’m going to get caught”/”The grass got wet”… Super prosaic stuff). There are often more formal constructs or “restructs” that allow you to get around such usage, but I think they’re just alternatives rather than the “correct way”.
I’m going to resist speculating, or even just plain old guessing where part 2 is heading in the hope of getting a nice surprise ;-)
The “get”-passive is super helpful as a bridge to the German one, but it does have its quirks, at least as I know and use it.
“Get killed” or “caught” is a pretty good case in point. Like, it’s obviously more informal than the “be” version, which in this case really doesn’t have a different meaning (“he got caught shoplifting” vs. “he was caught shoplifting” – to me, that’s a true “get”-passive).
But it does still feel like there’s a subtle difference in vibe – to my ear, “get” has less of a neutral reporting feel and maybe an implication that this shouldn’t have happened, or was sudden or surprising, or that the event is somehow being highlighted or even judged.
Like, assuming the context is that Thomas is a soldier:
…sounds like a fact, sad but not necessarily unexpected, while
…sounds to me like it might/should have been avoidable (whether it was Thomas’ own fault or someone else’s).
Because of that, the example “your order is getting processed” really kind of sounds odd to me – like, should it not be?
Does that make sense for your Sprachgefühl?
Wow, this is tougher than expected, so I deliberately slept on it, which didn’t help much ;-) I have to admit that very few of the examples of “getting” in passive actually feel very natural to me. That is, I think they’re totally fine, but I don’t think I’d ever hear myself using many of them *in the wild*. There’s just a persistent feeling that “getting” would probably sound better being replaced by “being” or “becoming” or some other alternative (or at least doing so what lead to something that feels closer to the way English is spoken here). Maybe it’s just that “getting” feels very generic, a word you can use when you don’t know another way of putting it, or don’t want to be bothered. But I do agree that there’s a slight lack of “neutrality” there, or perhaps a kind of hyper-neutrality through using the being/becoming versions.
All that being said, there are definitely a few cases where Mr Get feels “right”: “getting married /divorced /separated /engaged…”. Or “I’m just getting dressed, be there in a few minutes”. And doubtless a few others.
((In the same sort of way, but independent of the “passive” context, “gotten” still feels weird to me, but I’ve almost gotten used to it through long and repeated exposure.))
Regarding “getting processed”: yeah, that one doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s almost indicating a second level of passivity to me (along the lines of “your form is __in the process of being processed__, so don’t worry about it). It’s “being processed” all the way for me!
Wow, this was super interesting!!
I feel like the mere fact that the get-passive is often more colloquial might influence these undertones. Same for “your order is getting processed”. Maybe you as a native speaker are just used to hearing this phrase in a “formal” tone and context.
Not saying that what you feel about “to get” is off, I’m just wondering where it comes from and I don’t think it’s the verb “to get” itself.
It’s more than just the fact that “get” is colloquial. The get-passive tends to feel more active and there can be a vibe that whatever happened was surprising, shocking, or someone is responsible for it somehow. Maybe the person was asking for it:
or someone else was at fault:
or the person arranged or worked toward something:
I think it does come from “get.” “To be” is a connecting word, an equals sign (at least partly). It’s more neutral, and “get” has more color. It has a bunch of different meanings, and those can change and get washed out, but I don’t think they disappear completely in the passive. You can see (or feel) traces. For example:
I think where “get” is helpful for thinking about the german passiv would be something like “French and English get spoken in Montreal “. To me suggests that this is an ongoing process.
For me this is closer to some of the passiv formulations that are trickier to translate into english e.g. “in BErlin wird gefeirt”.
It also gets away (no pun inteneded) from using “is” when discussing passiv, which often leads to confusion because of its ambiguity.
See, “French and English get spoken in Montreal” sounds – not wrong, but like there must be a reason for “get” rather “are.” It sounds to me like they’re spoken in Montreal, but not other places, or maybe that there’s some other dominant language in Montreal, but French and English aren’t completely left out.
Honestly, I think “get” sounds much less like an ongoing situation than “be” in passive.
Interesting. I’m not sure if i agree or not with the need for a reason, but i would tend to agree “are” would be be the first choice of the two…
“Your order is getting processed” sounds a little off, and I think part of it is a register mismatch. But it also has to do with the sounds. “Getting processed” is physically harder to say than “being processed.”
The sentence has a lot of R’s, and they tend to change the sounds around them. You know one is coming, so you instinctively start to get in position. And after you say one, it takes a second to get out of position.
“Being” is easy to fit in between all the R’s, but “getting” makes you completely re-combobulate.
“Being” sounds different in these two sentences because the “r” pulls the sounds down and back:
Wow, that’s a whole new dimension you opened up there. But I think especially for English, it’s a useful one to explore to find out what’s idiomatic and why or why not.
It’s true enough that “Your order is being processed” would fit a somewhat more formal setting. But I’d still find it odd or marked if someone, speaking informally about the situation, said:
This could hint that the processing is almost done, which seems likely enough given that “processing” is what you’d normally do to an order. But “get” also feels to me like the person is hinting that whatever’s happening to the order normally wouldn’t, and so the processing is news in some way.
If I’m just talking about what I found out about the status of the order, I’d either use “being” or else use active voice (“They told me they’re processing my order”). Not sure I’m sold on coleussanctus’ hypothesis based on the sounds…
I googled around a bit and found at least some instances for “got processed”, the funniest one being from an Apple forum.
But they’re all HIGHLY colloquial, for sure.