Indirect speech in French: what is it?

[jrineakter]

Hi! To make your French a little more natural, there are a few grammar tricks to know. Indirect speech is one of them. It's easy and very practical. Today, we're going to see together how it works.

Before moving on to the content and studying this grammatical concept together, I remind you that you can download the free PDF sheet which includes all the explanations and all the examples that will be presented to you in this video. It is the first link at the bottom that you can already open in another tab and which will help you revise the content that you will discover today.

So, what is indirect speech for? It is used to report words or thoughts. It exists in the present tense. For example: "He tells me he is tired". You see that here I am reporting a word. And it exists in the past tense: "he told me he was tired". We are going to see how it works today, both in the present and the past tense. We are going to do it simply, clearly and without jargon, so relax, take a deep breath, it is still the study of grammar. Let's go.

Let's start with the present indirect greece whatsapp number data speech. The simplest case is for affirmations. Here, we're going to add "that". In direct speech, imagine, you're with someone. Imagine, I'm with my brother and my brother, who is next to me, he says: "The weather is nice". If I want to report what he said, I'm going to use indirect speech and I'm going to say: "He says that the weather is nice". He says: "The weather is nice", and I, in indirect speech, I say: "He says that the weather is nice". You see that to go from direct speech to indirect speech, we add "that".

For simple questions, questions that can be answered with "yes" or "no", we will add "if". For example, in direct speech, if we ask: "Is the weather nice?" you see that it is a question that can be answered with "yes" or "no", when we move to indirect speech, we will say: "He asks if the weather is nice". Is the weather nice; he asks if the weather is nice.

For questions with an interrogative word, we will keep the same structure but we will not invert the subject and the verb. For example, if in direct speech, we have: "Where are you going?", here the "where" is of course the interrogative word, we have even inverted the subject here in direct speech, in indirect speech, we will say: "He asks where you are going". So, we keep the same structure "where are you going" except that we remove the inversion: "He asks where you are going".