I was reading some graded readers last night and found some grammar that seemed odd in this story told from the perspective of a huge apple.
The apple said it was eaten as follows:
わたしを食べました
That made sense but also felt kinda odd, I had not learned the passive form and wondered at first if Japanese even needed one. But I looked at the Tofugu article for the passive form and it seems you would normally use a られる form like:
（私は）食べられた
Is this more usual and correct?
Is the sentence in the story is grammatically correct and if you would sound weird saying something like that? Does the fact that the narrator is an apple change what should be used?
I’m also used to slang phrases like “I got eaten by mosquitoes” in English, would it be weird to say 私は虫に食べられた?
So, the sentence here is not “I was eaten”, but rather “The children ate me”.
If the sentence needed to be “I was eaten” – then indeed 私は食べられました would be a good way to say that.
I think 私は虫に食べられた would mean that the insects ate you completely (story for a horror movie)
If you want to say that you were bitten by mosquitoes, I think 私は蚊に刺された should work fine.
Here are some sentences involving mosquitoes:
Btw, this is another useful feature of jisho.org – if you want to see how a word is used, you can type <word> #sentences (like 蚊 #sentences in this example) – and get context sentences for that word. Alternatively, you can click on the “Links” under the word and do a sentence serach from teh context menu
Note also that if the context makes a suitable subject obvious, the 子どもたちは can be dropped. 私を食べました always means “[some unstated but clear subject] ate me”, never “I was eaten”.
I think the combination of “the speaker is an apple” and “the story is in very simple Japanese” combine to put it in an odd place where it’s not worth putting too much analysis in beyond “do I understand this?”.
I think 私は食べられました is liable to be read as carrying a negative implication (“I was eaten and that was bad”) which we don’t want here, so a version of this story that used more complex grammar might still choose not to use it.
