What you need to know

The Passive is not difficult to learn and as it is widely used in the scientific realm and
also for instructions or descriptions of situations as well as in news you should know of
it as early as possible. It puts the listener's focus on the action instead of the person who
is performing that action and helps to express information objectively. You already
know all components of the passive. Let's put them together:

All you need is the appropriate form of werden and the past participle which is the
same form that you use to express the Perfekt past tense [see level A1]. A few more
examples before we move on:

In German courses you will come across exercises where you have to transform a
normal sentence - also called active clause- into a passive clause. This is helpful to
understand the more advanced usage of the passive. Let us go through a few simpler
examples for now:
As you can see, there is an accusative object (=eine Suppe). This is very important to
notice. To turn this sentence into a passive one you'll need to take this accusative object
and make it the subject ('the boss'):
 As the soup has turned into the subject, there is no object left over. And that's fine.
Also, the cook is gone as with the passive we want to focus on the action (=cooking
soup) instead on who is doing it. But let's say you would like to toll the cook a little bit
of respect while not giving up your focus on the action. For that you could, but wouldn't
have to, integrate him or her with the help of von:

Again there's no accusative object left. In fact they remain pretty absent until very much
later on, so don't bother for now. The cook is what your teacher or book will call the
*Täter perpetrator. For now the Täter is integrated with the help of von which always
requires the dative. One last example:

Again there's no accusative object left. In fact they remain pretty absent until very much
later on, so don't bother for now. The cook is what your teacher or book will call the
*Täter perpetrator. For now theTäter is integrated with the help of von which always
requires the dative. One last example:

Finally here are the forms of werden that you need to build the Passiv Präsens:
 ich werde

 du wirst

 es wird
 wir werden

 ihr werdet

 sie werden

That's enough for the beginning. Exercise this thoroughly in the upcoming exercise
section.

Schritt 04: Preaching with Passiv Präsens

Preaching Update
The Passiv is a wonderful thing to know. It is quite frequently used in daily life and as
an English speaker you already are familiar - even though possibly on a rather
subconscious level - with this phenomenon. So don't worry, you'll get a grasp of this
topic quite quickly. Nevertheless, here some preaching.

Übung
As always a couple of examples. The examples in this lesson are a bit absurd as no one
would seriously have a conversation about how one's hand bag gets stolen right now but
bear with us. This will be recycled very soon:

 Auto (n) - car | waschen - to wash | dreckig - dirty

A | Was passiert da gerade mit deinem Auto?
What's happing there (in this moment) with your car?
B | Es wird gewaschen.
A | Warum wird dein Auto gewaschen?
B | Weil es dreckig ist.
 Tasche (f) - (hand) bag | stehlen - to steal | schick - fashionable
A | Was passiert da gerade mit deiner Tasche*?
B | Sie wird gestohlen.
A | Warum wird deine Tasche gestohlen?
 B | Weil sie schick ist.

* Stick to "passiert" in the first question.

Now try it for yourself. Imagine you are watching all these things happening from
behind your security camera. They are happening right now (and the police will get
the bad guys and girls.

 Frau (f) - wife | anfahren - to collide with something | Fahrer betrunken sein - The
driver was drunk.
 Sohn (m) - son | entlassen - to get fired | faul sein - be lazy
 Handy (n) - mobile phone | zerkratzen - to scratch | unachtsam sein - to be inattentive
 Wohnung (f) - flat | einbrechen - to break in | in Urlaub sein - to be on holidays
 Fahrrad (n) - bike | beschädigen - to damage | teuer sein - to be expensive
 Nachbar (m) - neighbor | verprügeln - to beat up | provozieren - to provoke

Further Preaching
Describe what is happening day by day in your company, school or in your house. What
is being done, broken, cleaned, opened, closed, turned on, off and so on. There are
hundreds of things that are being done around you every single day. You won't run out
of possibilities to practice the passive ;)