The passive with the participle plus jana
I can form a passive sentence
Look at these examples. Can you spot the grammar pattern?
Hindi is spoken here.
I can't bear to watch this.
The door was shut.
Pay attention to the highlighted parts. What do they have in common?
The participle agrees with the subject of the passive sentence, and जाना carries the tense.
राम से यह काम नहीं हुआ - Ram couldn't manage this work. But naming the doer in a passive is far less common than in English; the whole point is usually to leave them out.
A negated passive is the ordinary way to say that someone simply cannot manage something:
This is not the same as नहीं खा सकता, which is about ability or permission. The passive version is about the thing being beyond you.
Apply this grammar in A2 course exercises
Practice ExercisesNaming the agent in every passive, as English does, and confusing the inability passive with sakna.
Naming the agent where Hindi would omit it
Leave the doer out unless it matters; that is what the passive is for.
Using sakna where the inability passive is meant
mujhse nahin khaya jata is 'I can't manage it', like mne ne spitsya.
Hindi is spoken here.
Best rendered in Russian by the subjectless 'govoryat' rather than a -sya form.
I can't bear to watch this.
The inability passive: the thing is beyond you, not forbidden to you.
The door was shut.
A compound verb inside a passive; jana still carries the tense.
Practice in course
Apply this grammar in A2 course exercises
Yamuna Kachru's reference grammar; the descriptive account of aspect, compound verbs and the ergative used here.
Kamta Prasad Guru's grammar, still the standard prescriptive reference for Hindi verb morphology.
The Government of India standard for Devanagari spelling, followed for the written forms in these topics.