Passive form and transitive pairs

Passive verbs exist to turn the object of a verb into the subject. Unlike てある, passives describe the action as it happens, rather than making a statement about an enduring state left by the result of that action.

A simple example of a passive sentence in English would be “The cake is eaten by me”. The active version would be “I eat the cake”. In the passive version, the cake becomes the subject, as the action of eating is seen from its perspective.

Godan and ichidan verbs form the passive in different ways. Godan verbs take the negative stem and replace ない with れる, the passive suffix. Ichidan verbs take the stem and add られる.

殺された人間の死体
The dead bodies of people who were killed.

魚が食べられた
The fish was eaten.

The person who performs an action is the "agent". If you want to mention the agent of a passive verb, you use に or によって, but for certain verbs から is acceptable too. There are some rules for when you should use に or によって, but you don’t need to look them up or memorize them now. Just recognize the pattern when you see it.

魚が猫に食べられた
The fish was eaten by a cat.

In grammar study, there's the concept of verbal "transitivity", which basically defines whether a verb accepts a direct object or not. As we know from Lesson 3, the direct object is marked by を, while the subject is marked by が.

彼を教えた
I taught him. (transitive)

彼が死ぬ
He dies. (intransitive)

Note: do not fall for the trap of believing that if a sentence uses が it is intransitive, and if it uses を it is transitive. Transitive verbs still have a subject. A sentence like 私が魚を食べる still shows 食べる as a transitive verb despite the が being there.

"Transitive pairs" are pairs of japanese verbs that represent the same type of action, but one is transitive, and the other is not.

In English transitive/intransitive pairs are very rare (raise/rise is a commonly mentioned one), because in English the same verb can often show both transitive and intransitive usages: “I blew up a car” (transitive action) vs “A car blew up” (intransitive action)

It is important to remember the distinction between an intransitive verb and a transitive verb conjugated passively. An intransitive verb is still describing an action performed actively by a subject, while a transitive verb turned passive describes an action that the subject receives passively by the influence of someone or something else.