German A2 - The Passive Voice

In English we have what’s known as active voice and passive voice. The active voice is the typical mode in which people talk and write. An example of the active voice in English would be: “The center fielder threw the ball all the way to home plate”, with the noun ‘ball’ acting as the direct object. An alternate way of saying the same thing would be to switch the nouns and use the passive voice: “The ball was thrown by the center fielder all the way to home plate.” Although the ‘ball’ is still the thing being thrown, it’s now the subject of the sentence. This is the essence of the passive voice.

The passive voice is used in many languages, including German. To form the passive voice in German, you use the verb ‘werden’ together with the past participle of the action verb. This handout takes a detailed look at the German passive voice, with mini-lessons and example sentences in the present tense, preterite tense and perfect tense.

This handout also explains how to use modal verbs in the passive voice, both in the present and past tenses. The lessons end with a brief explanation on how to tell a passive-voice sentence apart from other sentences that also contain the verb ‘werden’.