Russian · Chapter 16 · Lesson 9 · Grammar primer
Passive voice
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Otkryt and otkrytyy are not interchangeable
Otkrytoye okno describes a window; okno otkryto reports its state. Keep the short form for the predicate after the subject and the long form for describing a noun in front of it, and every shop sign in Russia stops looking odd.
Magazin otkryt s devyati utra.
Menya zovut is the impersonal they, not a passive
Russian has no passive for is called: zovut is simply the they-form of zvat with no oni anywhere, meaning literally they call me. An English passive with no named doer, like is spoken here or is being built, very often becomes the same they-form in Russian.
Zdes govoryat po-russki.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
Read the full article · 7 min readPractice
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 9 of 17 in this chapter