All patterns
Passive & Causative
Who did what to whom — 被 for the passive, 让 / 叫 / 给 for making things happen.
Passive & Causative 2
To “make / let / have / ask” someone do something, Chinese uses a causative verb in one frame: Subject + 让 / 叫 / 请 / 使 + Person + Predicate. 妈妈不让我玩游戏 (“Mum won't let me play games”), 老师叫我们安静 (“the teacher tells us to be quiet”), 我想请你帮个忙 (“I'd like to ask you a favour”). 让 is the everyday one and covers both “make” and “let”; 使 is the formal written version; 请 is the polite “ask / invite.”
被 (bèi) is the main way to make a passive sentence in Chinese: the thing an action happened to becomes the subject, and 被 introduces the doer, who can be dropped. Subject + 被 + Doer + Verb + 了 (热狗被男孩吃了, “the hot dog was eaten by the boy”). The verb needs a complement or 了 attached, and negation goes before 被.
Reading about grammar is not the same as using it.
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