Name: Reported Speech in English - How to Report Dialogues and Questions
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T09:21:24.000Z
Duration: 10 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

I want to speak really English from your first lesson.

The imperative

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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.

The first type of speech reporting I want to introduce is reporting statements.

Exactly the thing someone said, or it can be a summary of something someone said.

So keep in mind, these are not questions.

Let's look at the verbs and the other expressions we use to report simple statements.

The 1st 1 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 thing 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.

So this is the most basic Ferb we can use to report speech.

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 you can change.

Ah, the person speaking and the person receiving by changing thes two parts on either side of the for.

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 on Lee.

I'm not sharing information with him, really.

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 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 1st 1 is this was all was also I've used this in past tense here.

Ah, but was all is quite common to so was all is a very casual way of using a verb.

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, in the written words, we see 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 gonna believe this.

She was all she was all so sometimes this double you 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 Ah, it is fine to understand what's going on another one that uses this same WAAS pattern is using, like, another very casual way to report direct speech.

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.

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 may be 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 thes expressions.

And my mom was like so again, this double you sound My mom was like, this kind of disappears a little bit.

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.

Just as with was all and was like we used these to communicate direct quotes, these air exact quotes, things people actually said.

So again we could say they said, we're leaving, but using went again.

Has this sort of very casual, maybe gossipy, like there's a little bit of exciting information there, perhaps.

So we use thes two together in very casual situations.

Uh, that have kind of a quick, conversational feel about them.

We can say these things very quickly in a pair.

So having this kind of went and go match together feels very natural, I think, to native speakers.

She was all and my mom was like using these together in the same kind of dialogue report.

But generally, using a mix of all of these two reports statements is a really good idea.