Direct and indirect speech | Canguro English

so as you know one of the most difficult things when you're learning a language is finding motivation especially with children but because I am a very progressive teacher I have discovered a special technique to to motivate our students here at the school hello and welcome to kangaroo English I'm Christian and today we are going to be talking about reported speech reported speech in any language is really really important because something that we do every day in languages is we tell stories we tell stories about what happened yesterday about what happened last year and stories almost always contain speech somebody said this and somebody said that so today I'm going to teach you how to use reported speech like a native speaker and also I am going to tell you about a type of reported speech that half of English people use but that probably you don't even know it exists but before we can talk about reported speech we need to understand the sequence of tenses okay now in languages you have two possibilities for the sequence of tenses you have a natural sequence of tenses or an attracted sequence of tenses and in English we prefer the attracted sequence of tenses I'll give you an example imagine that I see you at a party and you say I live here hmm I live here you're using present simple because it's something that's true and my reply is I didn't know you live here now you can see here that when I repeat the verb live I am continuing to use present simple because you live here this is something that's true so it's also true here but in English because we prefer an attracted sequence of tenses that means that we prefer to make the verbs in the sentence in the same tense this verb here in the past attracts this verb here to also be in the past so in English we would prefer to say I didn't know you lived here I want to say that this is not a rule okay it's not obligatory to use the attracted sequence but it's something that we definitely prefer in English mostly we use the natural sequence of tenses for emphasis okay for example I will get married you tell me you will get married now if I have my reply I didn't know you we'll get married I could use the attracted sequence of tenses and say I didn't know you would get married but if I want to emphasize that we are talking about the future or clarify we are talking about the future then I can use the future like this no problems so now let's talk about reported speech okay so there are two types of reported speech direct and indirect and direct is the most easy direct is when we repeat exactly what the person says for example imagine I say I love pizza which is true I love pizza now you could say direct speech Christian said I love pizza so you can see there is no change you are repeating exactly what I say and we must use okay our quotation marks so the second type of reported speech is in direct and this is a little bit more complicated and this is why we needed to understand the sequence of tenses okay so the original again I love pizza but this time look at the difference Christian said he loved pizza okay so you can see the first thing we have changed the pronoun because I and he okay it's different it doesn't make sense because you are not me and also you will notice that we have used an attracted sequence look Christian said this is the past so also we prefer to put the verb in the past he loved pizza now as I said before this is not obligatory because I love pizza in general so you could also say Christian said he loves pizza but normally we would only use that for emphasis now let's look at a sentence which is a little bit more complicated okay this is the original quotation I want you to come to my house so first we need to change the pronouns okay so Christian said he not I he and now we're going to put the verb in the past okay the attracted sequence wanted you know wanted me to come no because come is here okay if I am Christian you come to my house but if you are you then you go to my house he wanted me to go to go okay not come too and also it's not your house it's my house so we need to change the possessive his house and you can see with indirect speech that we have no quotation marks and also if you want optionally you can put that Christian said that's okay but it's not obligatory so you can see that sometimes using indirect speech is a little bit complicated because you have to change the verbs and the pronouns and the possessives but if you practice a little bit then you will get faster and faster and it will be more and more natural I said at the beginning of this video that I was going to show you a way to use reported speech that you probably didn't know existed and that native speakers use 50% of the time well this is it be like and go sometimes when we are telling a story we want to do imitations or impersonations of people speaking and if we want to do an imitation then we use be like and go for example I was like I love pizza and he went really so you can see that when I repeat the direct speech I'm doing an impression of how the person was speaking their facial expressions ok so this is really excellent for adding some interest to your stories this is a chart that shows by age how often people use say or be like so you can see that younger people use say and be like equally okay and it reduces a little bit as we move into the older generation but this is very very common so I have shown you that you can use say and be like and go but they are not the only verbs that we can use to report speech there are lots of different options and they can help you to make your reported speech more interesting okay so here are three examples okay that we can use with indirect speech so he admitted that he ate too much pizza and he suggested that he go on a diet and he promised not to eat so much pizza so if you want to make your reported speech more interesting then try to use some other verbs not just say and tell okay and to help you I have this fantastic PDF from the University of Adelaide with lots of different reporting verbs how to use them which prepositions to use the link is in the description so download this and start practicing well that was the class about reported speech and I hope that you learnt a lot and that you feel comfortable now using reported speech in English if you would like to see any more videos about the English language then don't forget to subscribe I'm Christian this is kangaroo English I'll see you in class [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 22,521

Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, how to learn english, Direct and indirect speech, direct and indirect speech in English, english direct and indirect speech, english direct and indirect speech rules, english direct and indirect speech examples, english direct and indirect, english direct and indirect object, how to use english direct and indirect

Id: Y-r4qWHHe_E

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2017