Passive Voice with ถูก / โดน

Thai marks the passive only when something bad happened. Otherwise it simply reorders the sentence.

The passive of misfortune

thuk (ถูก) in front of a verb makes a passive, and it carries a strong flavour: the thing that happened was unwelcome. thuk khamoi is 'got robbed'. thuk du is 'got told off'. don (โดน) does the same job in more casual speech, and is if anything even more clearly about something bad. don rot chon, got hit by a car. This is very different from English, which uses the passive freely for neutral facts. In Thai, marking the passive on a neutral event sounds strange, as if you were implying you had been wronged by it.

Naming who did it

To include the agent, put it between thuk and the verb: thuk khon khap rot chon, hit by the driver. In practice the agent is left out most of the time, because if you knew and cared who did it you would probably say the sentence the active way round. doi (โดย) is the formal 'by', used in writing and news reports rather than conversation. If you are reading a sign or an article you will meet it; you rarely need to produce it.

The neutral way to say it

For anything that is not a misfortune, Thai does not use a passive at all. It puts the affected thing first and leaves the verb active, and that is enough. ngan set laeo: the work is finished. pratu poet yu: the door is open. No marker, no agent, no problem. This is worth practising deliberately, because the English instinct is to reach for 'was done'. In Thai the topic-first sentence is the natural form and the passive is the marked, loaded one.

Getting something good

When the thing that happened was welcome, the marker is dai rap (ได้รับ), meaning 'received'. dai rap ngoen, got paid. dai rap chueng choen, was invited. It is a little formal and very common in writing, notices and polite speech. In casual conversation people often just use dai (ได้) alone. So the choice is three-way: thuk or don for bad, dai rap for good, and no marker at all for neutral. Getting this right is one of the clearest signals that you understand how Thai thinks about events.

Things that happen to you

The first three are misfortunes and take a marker. The last three are not, and do not. That contrast is the whole topic.

Using thuk for neutral events

Saying ahan thuk tham for 'the food was made' implies something unfortunate was done to the food. Native speakers will understand you and find it odd. The fix is to stop translating the English passive. Put the thing first, leave the verb alone: ahan tham set laeo.

Mixing up the three thuk words

thuk (ถูก) is passive-of-misfortune, and the same syllable also means cheap and correct. Tone and context separate them, and in practice the verb that follows tells you which is meant. If a verb follows, it is the passive. If a noun or nothing follows, it is cheap or correct. thuk laeo, that is right. thuk kwa, cheaper. thuk khamoi, got robbed.

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