Quote:
Originally Posted by Maxful
Thanks masaegu san. And yes, those sentences are rather difficult for me to understand and the last time I saw my sensei, he had trouble explaining it to us as most of us do not understand what "The debtor died on me" means.  |
Maxful, this structure has a specific name in English ("suffering passive"), and it is taught at the same time as passive because the structure is the same. Although many people do not like the special term given to it because Japanese people do not call it this at all. They just call it plain ol' 受け身 (passive).
But basically it goes like this. Normally you have a sentence "X did Y." However, if Z was negatively affected by X doing Y, you could show this by saying
ZはXにYをされた。 rather than just saying XはYをした。