german_sentence_builder

The passive voice
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In German, the passive voice is a widely used structure. There are two forms of the
passive voice. The first consists of a conjugation of the verb werden and a past
participle:
The active voice
werden 1 past participle
Es wird 1 gebrochen.
It is (being) broken.
But before looking at the passive voice, let’s consider the active voice, which is
essentially the parent of the passive voice. The active voice sentence is made up of
a subject, a transitive verb, and a direct object, a combination of direct and indirect
objects, or the object of a dative verb:
subject 1 transitive verb 1 object active voice
Er hat den Richter gestört.
He disturbed the judge.
Sie gibt dem Herrn ein Geschenk. She gives the man a gift.
Wir haben der Lehrerin gedankt. We thanked the teacher.
The passive voice in German
The elements of the passive voice sentence are the conjugation of werden and a
past participle. Let’s look at the various tenses of the passive voice in the third
person singular with the verb lesen:
Present: wird gelesen is read
Past: wurde gelesen was read
Present perfect: ist gelesen worden has been read
Past perfect: war gelesen worden had been read
Future: wird gelesen werden will be read
Notice that the perfect tenses use worden as the past participle of werden. This
only occurs in the passive voice, in which werden is translated as to be. When
werden means to become or get, its past participle is geworden.
If the active voice sentence has an accusative direct object, the passive voice
sentence uses the direct object as its subject, which must be in the nominative
case. The tense of the verb in the active sentence becomes the tense of the verb
werden in the passive sentence. The active voice subject becomes the object of the
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