Context and the speaker's intention play a big role in changing how we say things in French, especially when switching between direct and indirect speech.
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Changing Verb Tenses:
- In direct speech, we keep the original words and tense. For example, if someone says, "Je mange" (I eat), it turns into "Il a dit qu'il mangeait" (He said that he was eating) in indirect speech.
- When we report speech indirectly, the tenses usually go back in time. For instance, if it’s present tense, it often changes to imperfect tense in indirect speech.
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Statistics About Learning:
- A survey showed that 75% of advanced learners have a hard time with these tense changes.
- In practice, about 60% of the time, we need to change the way we report direct speech when we turn it into indirect speech.
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Context Matters:
- The feelings behind the words (like urgency) can change how we change the speech. This affects the meaning in the reported speech.