"He said that the weather had been nice".

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jrineakter
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Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2025 7:18 am

"He said that the weather had been nice".

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The present tense will be transformed into the imperfect. If in the present tense you have: "He says it's nice weather", when we tell this in the past tense, we will transform the present tense into the imperfect in the second part: He says it's nice weather; He said it was nice weather. We move here to the imperfect tense. This is the concordance of tenses. Here, the imperfect tense only has a phonetic value. The action did not actually occur in the past tense. It wasn't nice weather in the past, it's nice weather right now. But since we have this concordance of tenses, we use the imperfect tense to mark indirect speech.

The past tense will be transformed into the pluperfect. If we have in the present tense: "He says that the weather was nice", we will transform the past tense into the pluperfect:

The near future will turn into "aller" in the imperfect + infinitive. If you hear: "He says it's going to be nice" in the present; in the past, it will give: "He said it was going to be nice".

The simple future will be transformed greece whatsapp number data into a conditional. If you have in the present: "He says that it will be nice", we will transform the "will be nice", the simple future, into a conditional: "He said that it would be nice".

Please note that this agreement of tenses is only essential for the tenses we have just seen. For the rest, for what is infinitive, subjunctive, imperfect, pluperfect and conditional, there is no transformation, no change.

Last change, the tense indicators will change when the speech is in the past tense. "Tomorrow" becomes "the next day"; "yesterday" becomes "the day before"; "now" becomes "at that time". For example, if you have: "It was nice yesterday", in indirect speech, you will have: "He said it had been nice the day before". The "yesterday" changes to "the day before". We do not say: "He said it had been nice yesterday".

This indirect speech is used a lot in everyday life, it is really very useful. The French use it all the time to report words etc. So, it is something that you have to master. You necessarily hear it often if you listen to content, so maybe try to pay attention to see when it is used. You see that it is a set of mechanisms that must be integrated and that you must make reflexes of. Really, if you are attentive when you listen, these reflexes, you will acquire them. It will become something automatic and natural.

Now that you have understood these basics, and you can download the PDF sheet to review, to fully understand these different changes, you have all the keys to go a little further and try, when you listen, to detect this change direct speech - indirect speech. You can even start to create your own sentences. Moreover, you can tell us in the comments or suggest sentences in direct speech and indirect speech.

Thank you for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, give it a thumbs up, share it with your friends who are studying French if you want to help them better master and understand this grammatical concept. And of course, subscribe to the Français Authentique You Tube channel by activating notifications so you don't miss any of the two videos we publish each week.
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