[General] Our car collided

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suniljain

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Our car was collided with other cars on the street.

I understand we can't use 'was' before 'collided"? Why?

Collided is not an intransitive verb. Am I right?
 

Raymott

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You keep asking this question, so obviously the responses you've been getting about transitive/intransitive verbs and active/passive sentences aren't helping. I suggest you try to look at it another way.
Your car collided with other cars. Why do you want to put 'was' before 'collided'?
There must be some reason you want to take a good sentence, and make it into a bad one.
 

suniljain

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You keep asking this question, so obviously the responses you've been getting about transitive/intransitive verbs and active/passive sentences aren't helping. I suggest you try to look at it another way.
Your car collided with other cars. Why do you want to put 'was' before 'collided'?
There must be some reason you want to take a good sentence, and make it into a bad one.

I could not understand why can't we use "was"? I understand "collided" is transitive verb here.
 

MikeNewYork

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"Collided" is intransitive there.
 

Raymott

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He knows that, from the many similar questions he's asked. But does he understand what it means?
 

MikeNewYork

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Don't know.
 

suniljain

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"Collided" is intransitive there.

Transitive verbs are action verbs that have an object to receive that action whereas intransitive verbs there is no object to receive the action. To find a direct object of a transitive verb, we need to find a verb and then ask what or whom? If the questions seems non sensical then we are dealing with intransitive verb.

I have followed the above rule in the original sentence. Like our car collided with what. The answer is "with other car". So I guess "collided" is transitive verb. Please let me know what am I missing?
 

Roman55

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To find a direct object of a transitive verb, we need to find a verb and then ask what or whom?

Yes, but you didn't ask that. You asked 'with what', and that means that 'the other car' an indirect object. Ergo, it's intransitive.
 

Tdol

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I have followed the above rule in the original sentence. Like our car collided with what. The answer is "with other car". So I guess "collided" is transitive verb. Please let me know what am I missing?

In your passive version, which is incorrect, you'd have to say something like our car was collided by me with other cars.
 

Matthew Wai

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Our car was crashed by me into other cars.
 

Matthew Wai

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It is the OP instead of native speakers who wants to use the passive.
 

Raymott

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What I was trying to suggest was to forget about labelling the verbs and to just think about the concepts described by the sentence.
Hindi has active/passive and transitive/intransitive. From what I can tell, they are cognate. If a certain action is transitive in Hindi, it should be in English, since the action is the same.
So, with "John hit something", you don't need to ask whether 'was' can be inserted before 'hit'. If a sentence makes sense with the equivalent of "John helping verb जाना (conjugated) hit something", then it should also make sense in English. It might help if you learnt about these in concepts in Hindi, and then tried to apply them automatically in English simply on the basis of the actions, without any grammatical analysis.

http://taj.chass.ncsu.edu/Hindi.Less.15/grammar.html
http://taj.chass.ncsu.edu/Hindi.Less.23/grammar05.html
 
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