🇰🇷 Lesson 15: Passive Verbs

Think about the last time your morning went wrong. The alarm didn't go off. The road was jammed. Somebody's elbow got you on the subway, and your coffee got spilled. In stories like that, things happen to you. Often you don't even know who did them. Korean has a whole family of verbs for these moments: 길이 막혔어요 ("the road was jammed"), 문이 닫혔어요 ("the door closed"), 발을 밟혔어요 ("I got my foot stepped on"). This lesson covers them.

🧠 The Mental Model: A Different Verb, Not a Different Construction

English makes the passive with a helper verb: close → be closed, catch → be caught. The verb itself doesn't change. Korean mostly works like the English pair raise / rise: the passive is a separate verb, built by inserting a short suffix into the stem. 닫다 "to close (something)" becomes 닫히다 "to be closed / to close (by itself)". 열다 "to open (something)" becomes 열리다 "to be opened / to open".

English often uses the passive to sound formal or objective. Korean mostly uses it when the following is true, and the natural English translation is often not passive at all:

🧩 The Four Suffixes: -이-, -히-, -리-, -기-

Here is the honest truth about these suffixes: they are lexical. No rule tells you with certainty which suffix a verb takes, or whether it has a suffix passive at all. You learn 닫히다 the way you learn any other word. There are useful tendencies based on the last sound of the stem, and they will help you guess and remember. They are tendencies, though, not laws.

-이- (mostly after a vowel, or ㅎ / ㄲ)

Watch the contractions: 바꾸 + 이 → 바뀌, 나누 + 이 → 나뉘, and 잠그 + 이 → 잠기 (the ㅡ drops). The contracted forms are the standard spelling.

-히- (mostly after ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ)

-리- (after ㄹ, and after 르-irregular and ㄷ-irregular stems)

듣다 → 들리다 and 누르다 → 눌리다 show the irregular stems at work, just as before vowel endings.

-기- (mostly after ㄴ, ㅁ, ㅅ, ㅊ)

🔁 Double Duty: Verbs That Are Both Passive and Causative

Next lesson you'll meet causative verbs ("make someone do"). They use the same -이/히/리/기- suffixes, so some verbs have identical passive and causative forms. The sentence frame tells you which one you're looking at. A passive has the "receiver" as its subject and no object. A causative has a new "causer" as its subject and usually an object with 을/를.

The last two rows come from different base verbs (듣다/들다, 걸다/걷다). Their passive readings are far more common, so just recognise the causative ones.

🌀 -아/어지다: The All-Purpose Passive

You met -아/어지다 in Lesson 12 on adjectives, where it means "become": 추워지다, 예뻐지다. On a verb it works as a passive: the action "gets done" or "comes about". It fills the gaps the suffix passives leave, and it's very common in written Korean.

-아/어지다 often carries a feeling of "it happens on its own / it works". Compare two passives of 쓰다:

🏷️ 하다-Verbs: 되다, 받다, 당하다

하다-verbs can't take a suffix, so they swap 하다 for another light verb. Each one has its own flavour:

A related everyday verb: 도둑맞다 "to have something stolen": 카페에서 노트북을 도둑맞았어요 ("I had my laptop stolen at a café"). 맞다 here works like 당하다: something bad lands on you.

🎯 -게 되다: "It Turned Out That…"

-게 되다 is the passive of situations. It means "come to / end up / it's been arranged that". The change happened through circumstances, not simply through your own decision. Attach -게 되다 to any verb stem.

🌏 Culture Note — the modest announcement: Koreans often announce good news with -게 되다 even when they chose it themselves: 저희 다음 달에 결혼하게 됐어요 ("We're getting married next month"), 이번에 승진하게 되었습니다 ("I've been promoted"). Framing the news as something that came about sounds humble and gracious. 결혼해요 is fine too, just plainer. The opposite happens with blame. A child who knocks over a cup says 컵이 깨졌어요 ("the cup broke"), but an adult apologising at work takes ownership with the active form: 제가 실수로 컵을 깼습니다. 죄송합니다. Choosing between the passive and the active is partly a choice about responsibility.

👤 Who Did It? Marking the Agent

에 의해(서) belongs to news, textbooks and reports, and it goes most naturally with 되다 and -아/어지다. In conversation it sounds stiff. Korean speakers usually either drop the agent or switch to an active sentence. "The window was broken by Minsu" is most naturally 민수가 창문을 깼어요. Heavy use of 에 의해 is a well-known sign of translated English.

🦶 "I Got My Foot Stepped On": Passive With an Object

Here is a very Korean pattern with no neat English equivalent. When something happens to your body part or belonging, you are the subject and the body part or belonging keeps its object particle 을/를:

It's an "adversity" passive. The subject is the person affected, and the pattern usually describes something unpleasant.

🤔 Which One? Choosing a Passive

Passive verbs combine with everything you already know, and -아/어 있다 (Lesson 12) is a favourite partner for describing resulting states: 문이 열려 있어요 ("the door is open"), 벽에 그림이 걸려 있어요 ("a picture is hanging on the wall"), 이름이 적혀 있어요 ("a name is written on it").

💬 Dialogue: A Morning When Nothing Went Right

Count the passives: 꺼져, 들렸어요, 막혀서, 밀려서, 밟혔고요, 잠겨, 준비됐어요, 안 됐어요. Junho never says who turned off the phone or locked the door, because it doesn't matter to the story.

📰 Reading: The Lost-and-Found Office

A short news-style item (made up for this lesson) in 한다체. Notice how many verbs are passive, and how rarely an agent is named.

✏️ Practice

🧠 Check Your Understanding

If the four suffixes feel like a list of random exceptions right now, that's normal. It's the same for Korean children, who learn 닫히다 and 열리다 one word at a time. Every passive you meet in a real sentence stays with you better than ten you memorise from a list, so collect them from what you read and hear.

❓ Common Questions

🔮 Looking Ahead

You've seen that -이/히/리/기- can also make verbs causative, as in 보여 주세요. In Lesson 16: Causative Verbs you'll turn the picture around. Instead of things happening to people, people make things happen to others: parents who 먹이다, 입히다, 재우다 and 깨우다 their children, plus -게 하다 and 시키다 for getting someone else to do the job.