B1
让 and 使 — making things happen
How Chinese expresses causing, letting and making with 让, 叫 and 使, and why swapping 使 for 让 with a human subject sounds wrong.
让 covers everything English splits between let, make, have and get: one party brings about an action by another.
老师让我们写作文。
Lǎoshī ràng wǒmen xiě zuòwén.
The teacher had us write an essay.
妈妈不让我出去。
Māma bú ràng wǒ chūqu.
My mum won’t let me go out.
Whether it is let or make comes from context and never from the grammar. 让我看看 is let me have a look; 让我等了半个小时 is kept me waiting half an hour.
使 is for abstract causes
使 is written, formal, and used when the thing causing the effect is not a person issuing instructions — an event, a piece of news, a fact — and the result is a state rather than an action.
这个消息使我很高兴。
Zhège xiāoxi shǐ wǒ hěn gāoxìng.
The news made me very happy.
这使我想起了小时候。
Zhè shǐ wǒ xiǎngqǐle xiǎoshíhou.
It reminded me of my childhood.
老师使我们写作文。
老师让我们写作文。
A person telling other people to do something is 让 or 叫. 使 would make the teacher an abstract force producing a state, which reads as oddly grand.
让 works in the abstract cases too — 这个消息让我很高兴 is perfectly natural and less formal. The rule is one-directional: 让 is nearly always available, 使 is not.
叫 in speech
叫 does the same job as 让 and is common in conversation, with a faint sense of instruction rather than permission.
他叫我等一下。
Tā jiào wǒ děng yíxià.
He told me to wait a moment.
The overlap with 被
让 and 叫 double as colloquial passive markers — 我的自行车让人偷了 — which is covered under 被. The two uses are told apart by what follows: a passive names who did it and then the verb, a causative names who was made to act and then what they did. In practice the context settles it instantly and nobody is confused.