NI1 - Passive voice

Let's see the grammar point: passive voice. There are plenty of links about this but the general rules are these:

• Passive voice is much more used in English than in Spanish; it's a way of solving the impersonal form in Spanish: Se dice que... Se ha inaugurado... Me han dicho... Se habla inglés
• The verbal form is quite simple: TO BE + PAST PARTICIPLE; the auxiliary takes the tense and the past participle takes the meaning: The exhibition was inaugurated yesterday
• We use passive voice for 4 main reasons:
• when you don't know the subject of the action: A bank was robbed yesterday
• the subject is not important but the action: English is spoken here
• if the subject is hidden on purpose: I've been told you're engaged, is that true?
• when the subject is too general: It is said that English are cold but it's not so.

Remember it's much more used in English than in Spanish as this is a way to avoid "impersonal" sentences such as: "América se descubrió en 1492", "se dice que es muy importante" , "se habla alemán en esta tienda" o "me dieron esto para tí":

• America was discovered in 1492
• It is said that it is really important
• German is spoken (in this shop)
• I was given this for you.

If you go to the news you'll see many examples of passive voice. Let's see some of them: BBC news

If you want to work on this grammar point, here you are some links:

• quite long explanation with exercises on the different tenses of this form; click here
• a traditional way of practising: active into passive and so on; click here
• it's also quite traditional form of explanation with examples; click here and here for transformations.

If you want to read a further explanation, you can go to this post about passive voice or go to a previous post in my blog by clicking here.

To sum up you should take into account that passive voice functions as the impersonal form in Spanish and it's much more frequent and natural in English than in our language.

See you in class!