Passive in English

In English the passive is usually formed with the verb 'to be' i.e. she was promoted. But often we also use the verb to get, so you could also say 'she got promoted'. These seem to be mainly interchangable, but not completely, or at least to my ears one form sounds more natural in certain situations. For example, I think I would be much more likely to say someone 'got run over' as opposed to 'was run over', while something like 'he was advised to do something' sounds right, but not 'he got advised to do something'.

I first thought about this when I was learning German, which uses the verb werden (to become) to form the passive. It was brought to my attention that in English we use the verb 'to be' and it was implied this wasn't really that logical. I can see that argument, as it doesn't always make it clear whether you are referring to the act of doing something to someone, or the state they are in once that act has been completed. But then I thought about the fact that we do sometimes use 'to get', which in a way does correspond more to the German idea of using 'to become'.

Just wondering what others think of this, both native and non-native speakers?

Either way (German's or English's) works fine. Of course natural language follows its own rules and is logical in its own ways--maybe not in the sense we think of as logic applied to math or science but perfect for its purposes, nonetheless.

Anyway, it is interesting that you point out the correspondence between "get" and "werden." When I first learned the passive in German it was interesting to me that you had to use "werden" for all passives instead of having "be" as an option as in English. I also took Korean and passives are also formed in it by using the verb "become/get" (지다 'jida'), not the verb "to be." I'm sure using "become" is a very common way to form passives amongst the world's languages.

If my Swedish knowledge doesn't fail me it forms its passives in a few different ways. You can use "bli(va)" ("to become") "vara" ("be") "få" ("get") or add morphological -s to an active form of the verb. That's a lot of ways to form a passive! However, like in English they're not all necessarily interchangeable and can carry subtly different shades of meaning.

As for Spanish, it uses "ser," the permanent sense of "be" to indicate a passive action. French uses "être" ("be"), too, I believe.