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Gogaku

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N4

迷惑の受身

Adversity passive — suffering from something someone did (雨に降られた)machine translation

FormationPerson affected は + person/thing causing trouble に + verb in passive form

Japanese has a use of the passive that doesn't exist in Vietnamese: the adversity passive, expressing that the speaker suffered or was inconvenienced by someone's action or by an event. The classic example is 雨に降られました — literally "I was rained on," i.e. "I got caught in the rain and suffered for it."

What's special: even intransitive verbs can take this form (降る, 泣く, 死ぬ…), which is impossible in the ordinary passive. The person or thing causing the trouble takes に: 赤ちゃんに泣かれて寝られなかった (the baby cried on me and I couldn't sleep) — the baby was only crying, but the speaker bore the consequences.

When the action touches your belongings or a part of your body, Japanese keeps the affected person as the subject rather than making the object the subject: 足を踏まれました (had my foot stepped on), 財布を盗まれました (had my wallet stolen) — you don't say 私の足は踏まれました. Whenever you see a passive sentence with the "victim" at the front, think of this usage right away.

Examples

Related patterns

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