This article contains two lists of questions that can be used as conversation prompts. The idea is to use these questions to create passive sentences. They will hopefully challenge you to look up and learn some new verbs as well!

1. Formation of the passive

In order to form passive sentences, it’s helpful to know the Finnish verbtypes. This is useful for verbtype 1, because it behaves differently from other verbtypes. Verbtype 1 verbs have an infinitive that ends in two vowels (eg. seisoa, odottaa).

2. Translating Finnish to English

The Finnish passive often doesn’t match up neatly with the English passive. This makes these questions hard to translate in just one way. As such, we have multiple ways to translate these.

Firstly, we could use the proper passive. However, for many of the sentences below, a proper passive translation sounds unusual or creates a problem when trying to answer them accordingly. For example, asking “what is done with oars?” is a proper sentence but how do you answer this question using the same construction?

We could also use the generic “one” translation: “What does one do with oars?” The answer to this is possible in English: “One rows with oars”. However, this is also quite strange because it’s so archaic. The Finnish sentence doesn’t have that kind of connotation: they’re just regular sentences useful in everyday language.

This left me with three translations I consider viable. I could use “What does a person do with oars?”, “What do people do with oars?” or “What do we do with oars?” Of these three, Google Translate uses the latter and it definitely sounds good. Eventually, I decided to go with “people”. I did so because the passive in Finnish refers to an unnamed person and quite often a plural amount of unnamed people.

3. Passive sentences with tools

We can use passive sentences to express what is done with a certain tool. The adessive case ending -lla can be translated as “with” or “by”. Answer these questions using the passive form of the verb, paying attention to word order:

Mitä airoilla tehdään? – Airoilla soudetaan. (from the verb soutaa “to row”).

Word order matters here because starting with the passive would make the sentence a suggestion rather than a description. For the example above, “Soudetaan airoilla” means “Let’s row with oars”, while “Airoilla soudetaan” means “People row with oars” (passive “people” rather than specific people).

4. Passive sentences with places

We can use passive sentences to express what is done in a certain place. Make sure you use the passive form of the verb in your answer and pay attention to word order:

Mitä aavikolla tehdään? – Aavikolla ajetaan kamelilla, etsitään keidasta ja kuollaan janoon (the verbs ajaa, etsiä and kuolla in the passive form).

Hopefully these questions have helped you to form your own passive sentences!

Related posts:

The Passive – Present Passive The Passive Present Participle – TAVA-Participle Spoken Language Passive Overview Friendship Questions – Finnish Conversation Prompts