How is the passive voice used in German?

The passive voice in German is used to represent that something is in the process of happening, rather than a completed action. An example of this would be to say, 'The apple is being eaten'. This is passive because we are not told who is eating the apple - just generally that it is being eaten. To put it technically, the passive is used when the subject of the verb is the person or thing that is affected by the action: 'It is being drawn', 'They had been warned', 'He was seen' rather than specifically 'Jim is drawing it', 'Fritz had warned them', or 'Else saw him'. (As you can see from these examples, the passive can be used with a number of different tenses. For now, we're just going to focus on the present.)Forming the passive is pretty straightforward. It's a combination of the sentence's subject (the person or thing being affected by the action), the correct conjugation of 'werden' (the verb 'to become' - you should recognise this from GCSE when forming simple future) and then the past participle of your chosen 'action' verb.Let's take our example from earlier - 'The apple is being eaten'. To construct this sentence in German, you take the subject of the sentence, 'Der Apfel' and appropriate conjugation of werden, which in this case is 'wird'. This gives you 'Der Apfel wird' as the first part of your sentence. Now all you need is the past participle of your chosen verb - here, the apple is being eaten, meaning we need the verb 'to eat'. This is 'essen', of which the past participle is 'gegessen', so all you have to do now is put the two parts together, to make 'Der Apfel wird gegessen' - and there you have it! A model example of the passive voice in German.