Reported Speech in English - How to Report Dialogues and Questions

want to speak real english from your first lesson sign up for your free lifetime account at englishclass101.com hi everybody my name is alicia in this lesson we're going to talk about reporting speech in english i'm going to talk about the verbs we use and a couple of grammar points that you can think about so let's get started the first type of speech reporting i want to introduce is reporting statements so statements are just simple things simple sentences that people said so this can be direct dialogue exactly the thing someone said or it can be a summary of something someone said so keep in mind these are not questions i'm going to talk about questions later let's look at the verbs and the other expressions we use to report simple statements the first one is the very very neutral said i said said is the past tense form of say so we use say and past tense said as the most basic way to share something someone else said so we can use this for direct reports meaning exactly the things someone said we do this we use quotes to indicate direct speech or we can just use it as i have here to introduce a summary of something in this example sentence i said i had to work so this is just a simple summary i said something similar in the past perhaps but this is maybe not a direct report of my speech we can use said in most cases just to report information this was said by someone the speaker is here the subject so i in this case i said i had to work we could change it too he said he had to work it's fine they said they had to work so this is the most basic verb we can use to report speech let's move on to a couple other ones let's look at this told here i'm using the verb tell but i'm using past tense told so here the speaker is indicated at the beginning of the sentence he and then the person receiving the information in this case me follows the verb so he told me in this case the train was late he told me the train was late so this is a past situation i received information from him the information was this he told me the train was late so you can change uh the person speaking and the person receiving by changing these two parts on either side of the verb my mother told my brother to clean his room for example so keep in mind when you use the verb tell or in this case past tense told the idea is that it's more one-way communication it's not really a conversation in this case he told me so meaning information is coming this way only i'm not sharing information with him really he's just sharing something with me it's one way so we use told to communicate that of course we could use said here he said the train was late using tell or in this case past tense told uh just makes the feeling of one-way communication stronger he told me okay now i want to go on to some very casual expressions that you see for reporting direct speech especially in american english the first one is this was all was all so i've used this in past tense here you may hear this in present tense she's all as in this example but was all is quite common too so was all is a very casual way of using a verb like said however we use this to report direct speech so these quotes show this is exactly the thing someone said these little quotation marks in this case she was all you're not gonna believe this so this is the exact statement the speaker she said in the past she said exactly this we know this because we've used this reporting expression and in this case uh in the written words we see the the quotation marks here so when you're speaking or when you're listening for this you won't hear she was all you'll hear she was all so she was all you're not going to believe this it's quite fast she was all she was all so sometimes this w sound is very difficult to hear you might just hear she's all she's all in which case it sounds like present tense but in both cases the basic meaning of just communicating speech remains so don't worry too much about catching this w sound so this she's all uh is fine to understand what's going on another one that uses this same was pattern is using like another very casual way to report direct speech so in this case who is speaking my mom so my mom was like you can't go out this weekend so in this sentence too these words here are exactly the words my mother said but we use was like here so you'll notice that these two expressions was all and was like while they're very very casual they're used to kind of report something that's maybe shocking or surprising or maybe a little bit gossipy in this case maybe the speaker is complaining so it's very very casual situations that we use these expressions and my mom was like so again this w sound my mom was like this kind of disappears a little bit we can also use it in present tense my mom is like but my mom was like is good for a clear past tense report okay so we use the next pair went and go to report speech very casually so you can see here there is past tense went present tense go we use them in the same way again just as with was all and was like we use these to communicate direct quotes these are exact quotes things people actually said so they went we're leaving so again we could say they said we're leaving but using wendt again has this sort of very casual maybe gossipy like there's a little bit of exciting information there perhaps same thing with go so i go fine i'm leaving too so we use these two together in very casual situations that have kind of a quick conversational feel about them we can say these things very quickly in a pair they went we're leaving so i go fine i'm leaving too so having this kind of went and go match together feels very natural i think to native speakers same thing here she was all and my mom was like using these together in the same kind of dialogue report sounds quite natural i think but generally using a mix of all of these to report statements is a really good idea if you use the exact same expression to report report report all the time it sounds a little bit unnatural kind of stiff okay so these are all for statements these are all for statements let's look at two patterns for uh questions now so here i have the past tense asked and inquired used here i chose these two just because asked is kind of the casual or the everyday verb we can use for questions inquired just sounds more formal it's a more formal way of saying asked so some examples of this are i asked about the menu and i asked if there were any vacancies these are two common patterns i asked about some topic or i asked if and then there's some kind of inquiry point here i asked if there were any vacancies here same thing we can do with uh inquired he inquired about the company so we see the same about plus a topic point um we can also with the verb ask use a direct quote too so for example i asked what are you doing that's also okay we can use ask with a direct quote um you can also use it with inquired as well if you like but perhaps this one is a little bit more useful for everyday conversations and everyday questions so throughout this lesson i've talked about using the past tense and the present tense for reporting but what's the difference so i want to talk a little bit about that here to finish that so past tense and present tense both used to report speech both fine to report speech here i've used simple past and simple present tense you might also hear uh progressive tense in the past or in the present tense um but the difference between them present tense if you use present tense it feels like the story is happening now so if i'm using present tense to uh report speech and maybe to share the points in the story as well it sounds like the story is happening now it's present it's present tense it's happening in the present so if i want my story to feel kind of lively and more exciting i can use present tense to tell my story if however past tense is used it sounds more like just a simple report it's like you're just telling facts what happened there's not really like a feeling of excitement necessarily it's just simple reporting so we see past tense and simple past tense uh story reporting in the news for example so in the news it's simple reports of fact what happened on that day you'll see simple past tense used in english news reports so this is kind of a key difference that you can think about when you're telling stories and you're reporting information as well all right that's everything for this lesson i hope that it was useful for you if you liked the video please make sure to give us a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and check us out at englishclass101.com for other good study tools of course please feel free to drop us a message in the comments as well thanks very much for watching this episode and i will see you again next time bye [Music]

Channel: Learn English with EnglishClass101.com

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Keywords: English Language (Interest), learn english, Language (Quotation Subject), Teacher (Profession), american culture, english culture, EnglishClass101, how to, speak, write, read, english, native speaker, english grammar, grammar lesson, reported speech, report dialogues, report questions

Id: LZ0bMhta7RA

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2019