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Mixed Conditionals in English

Hi everyone! It’s Jennifer here with another lesson on conditional sentences in English. In the previous lesson, I asked you to report two statements with conditionals. So you had to change them from direct speech to indirect speech taking out the quotation marks. Here are the original words.

A. The teacher said if you finish your tasks in class you won’t have any homework. B. The teacher said if you had finished your work on time, I would have given you full credit. To complete this task correctly, you need to understand the difference between real and unreal conditionals That first sentence is a real or likely conditional about the present or near future: if you’ve finished the tasks.

A real conditional can follow the usual patterns in reported speech. Present verb forms shift back to the simple past. But let me say there will be variation. Shifting back the verb forms doesn’t have to happen, for example, if the action or event is still in the future. The second sentence I gave you uses an unreal conditional about the past: if you had finished your work. We don’t change the verb forms of unreal conditionals in reported speech.

They stay the same. Many of you posted your ideas. Let’s take a look at three sets of correct answers to see different possibilities Marat wrote the teacher said we wouldn’t have any homework if we finished the tasks in class. He chose to shift back. “Will” became “would” or the negative “wouldn’t” and “finish” became “finished” - simple past, and this is logical to change the verbs especially if we need to say what was said.

This situation has already passed. Second, the teacher said - and I didn’t mention if it was a male or female teacher - so Marat, it’s good to mention possibilities. Yes. Let’s use HE or SHE, though. The teacher said he or she would have given us full credit if we had finished (our) work on time.

Okay, so good with the reference words because in the first one you, the speaker, may be part of the class. We. And then in the second one the teacher could be a he or she. I also like that you played around with the word order. You can put that if-clause in that second position as you did Andrey wrote: The teacher said that if you finished the tasks in class, you wouldn’t have any homework.

Same shifting back. It’s logical. Andrey also chose to keep “that.” You can always have it in or take it out. It’s fine, and Andrey also chose to keep the if-clause in that first position, in which case we need commas.

Good. The second one sounds like this: The teacher said that if you had finished your work on time, you would have been given full credit. And in this case, Andrey chose to keep “you” and “your,” referring to another person or another group of people. So Ra’ed has similar choices and he wrote: The teacher said that if you finished the tasks in class, you wouldn’t have any homework.

The teacher said that if you had finished your work on time, you would have been given full credit. And I wonder if you caught one more difference in these examples: passive or active “She would have given us”… this is an active verb. “You would have been given” Passive. All three sets of answers are correct.

Thank you to everyone who completed that first task. These are the names of additional students who posted their answers. Thank you and be sure to compare your answers to the ones I just shared, okay? Overall you did well. So remember that in reported speech verb forms will only change in real conditionals, not unreal conditionals. And even in real conditionals, there’s sometimes an argument for not shifting back.

If the information remains true at the time of speaking, you don’t have to change the verb forms. Now it’s time to look at the bonus task from the previous lesson. It was another challenge with verb forms.

I asked you to identify the time period in my statement. If we had moved back to Moscow several years ago, our children would speak better Russian. First of all, is it real or unreal? One student had the answer.

He wrote: It’s an imaginary time period as it didn’t happen. Good. Yes. It’s imaginary, but what exactly is the time period? Claire stayed focused and realized that there was more than one time period here. Look at what she wrote. As usual there were a lot of excellent explanations in the comments.

Let me share just a few more. Mahmoud wrote: Correct! Let me change this to progressive. We’re imagining… Correct, and we’ll just put that in parentheses. Sean wrote: Correct! Correct! Gabriel shared his ideas and wrote: This is a second conditional sentence.

Well, possibly, but let’s not get into that old terminology: first, second, third… because it gets confusing. Let’s just say it’s a conditional sentence… What kind? It’s a conditional sentence which indicates a hypothesis. And we’ll say “something from the imagination of the speaker” and now we’re more on track.

Susana added: Ah, clever. We saw past… present. Both time periods are mentioned. What I wanted you to realize or recall is that we can have mixed conditionals. In other words, we can have mixed time periods. The most common pattern is an unreal past situation resulting in an unreal present.

What would be different now if something had been different in the past? In this type of mixed conditional, we use the past perfect in the if-clause to refer to an unreal past situation. Then we use would, could, or might + the base verb in the result clause. That refers to an unreal present.

Let’s practice. I’ll tell you a situation. You restate it using a mixed conditional, okay? Too bad for Ben, right? But if he had moved to Hollywood (like he had planned_, he could pursue his dream of becoming an actor. Good for Pauline, right? Because if she hadn’t saved enough money, she wouldn’t be able to buy an apartment now. Can you guess what your homework is?

Your first task is to post your own example of a mixed conditional. Write one sentence and post it in the comments. I’ll offer corrections as time allows in our next lesson on conditionals.