Gateway to Grammar: How to use reported speech

That baby knows style when he sees it. DAMN those are some good eyebrows. If you ever have to tell someone, what someone else said, you will have to use “reported speech”. Reported speech usually starts with “he said”, or “he told me”, and you then repeat what the person said but in the past tenses.

To begin with it is really helpful to think of the English tenses in order of time. Many English grammar techniques need you to ‘shift’ the time of a sentence further into the past. This is how English tenses shift back in time with reported speech:

·         Present simple/ continuous -> Past simple / continuous

·         Past simple / continuous -> Past perfect / continuous

·         Present perfect / continuous -> Past perfect / continuous

·         Past perfect / continuous -> Past perfect / continuous (note: there is no farther back than past perfect, so it just stays as past perfect!)

So, let’s have a look at some examples of quoted speech and how you would report it:

·         Quoted “I love cats so much” (present simple) -> Reported “She said she loved cats so much” (past simple)

·         Quoted “I worked in Germany for 7 years” (past simple) -> reported “She said she had worked in Germany for 7 years” (past perfect)

·         Quoted “I have been waiting here for an hour already” (present perfect continuous) -> reported “She said she had been waiting for an hour already” (past perfect continuous).

·         Quoted “I had worked there for a long time when I left” (past perfect) -> Reported “She said she had worked there for a long time when she left” (past perfect)

Basically, everything ends up as the past perfect in reported speech unless it is present simple. The present simple becomes the past simple. An easy way to remember why it goes into the past is that the conversation you just had has finished now, so we need a past tense to show that.

So, it’s time to go out and translate for babies now with reported speech! Let me know how you get on!