A2
被 — the passive, used far less than you would expect
How the 被 passive works in Chinese, why it carries a faint sense of something unwelcome, and why translating every English passive with 被 is the mistake to avoid.
被 puts the thing acted on first and marks the sentence as passive. The agent is optional, and often left out because it is unknown or beside the point.
我的手機被偷了。
Wǒ de shǒujī bèi tōu le.
My phone was stolen.
蛋糕被他吃完了。
Dàngāo bèi tā chīwán le.
He ate the cake.
我被老師批評了。
Wǒ bèi lǎoshī pīpíng le.
I got told off by the teacher.
The verb needs something after it here for the same reason it does with 把 — 了, a result, a complement. 我的手機 被偷 on its own is unfinished.
Chinese mostly does not mark the passive
This is the part worth learning, and it is the opposite of what an English speaker expects. A great many Chinese sentences are passive in meaning with no marker at all: you state the topic and then comment on it, and nobody is confused about who did what.
飯做好了。
Fàn zuòhǎo le.
The food’s ready.
信寄走了。
Xìn jìzǒu le.
The letter’s been sent.
這本書被寫得很好。
這本書寫得很好。
This book is well written is passive in English and needs no marker in Chinese. Reaching for 被 every time the English has a passive is the single most common way to make a sentence sound translated.
It leans towards the unwelcome
Traditionally 被 carries a suggestion that what happened was unfortunate — stolen, criticised, rained on, made to do something. That association is weakening, especially in writing influenced by English, but it is live enough that 我被邀請了 sounds faintly as though you would rather not have been.
For something good, the unmarked topic-comment sentence is usually better: 我 收到了邀請.
讓, 叫 and 給 in speech
Colloquially these do the same job, and 讓 in particular is very common. They require the agent, where 被 does not.
我的自行車讓人偷了。
Wǒ de zìxíngchē ràng rén tōu le.
Someone stole my bike.
人 there is doing the work of someone — an agent slot filled with a placeholder, because 讓 cannot be left bare the way 被 can.
The short version
Use 被 when the thing acted on is the subject and something went wrong or was done to someone’s detriment. Otherwise, state the topic and comment on it, and let the passive be implied.