Inverted Conditionals & Even if, Only if, Unless

Inverted Conditionals & Even if, Only if, Unless

Hi everyone! It’s Jennifer here with another lesson on conditional sentences in English. If you’ve watched my other lessons on conditionals, then you should feel quite confident about forming sentences with IF-clauses. You can always go back to the full playlist and review.

We’ve been forming real and unreal conditionals about the past, present, and future. For example: The next challenge is to form conditionals with words other than IF. As a homework task, I asked you to think about a goal you have and then tell me what you need to do to achieve it.

You had to use UNLESS. My example was… Let’s look at some of your goals. I’ve selected about a dozen sentences that everyone can learn from. Ra’ed starts us off and says… Julio wrote… Thank you for that example. We’ll take the quotation marks out. We don’t need those.

Andrea wrote… Hasan says… We’ll add a period. And Juan wrote… And we don’t really need the comma. Moving on, Francoise wrote… Our next example is… You could say “with one another” or just simply end there. Shabnam wrote… I would move this and say… Let’s just write that as all capitals.

Dildar wrote… In other words… Susana wrote… (or poses) And Sergey wrote… Thank you to everyone who completed the task. For your bonus task, I asked about the difference between EVEN IF and UNLESS. There were some very good explanations. I especially liked how some people offered alternative ways to word these ideas.

By reading the explanations with me, you’ll become more aware of structures with similar meanings. This will help you have more variety in your speech. I’ve selected a set of explanations that everyone can learn from. Gabriel wrote that… In other words,… Correct. Also about sentence one Mollie says… Yes. Sean wrote… Correct. Mahmoud writes… And Li writes… Yes.

You have the right idea. In this next set, Marat wrote that… Correct. Saddam wrote… Claire wrote… Correct. Correct. Another concise way to put that is… In Flavia’s words… In George’s words… Let’s summarize. EVEN IF is like “no matter what” or “regardless.” UNLESS is like “if…not.”

UNLESS is also similar to ONLY IF with a negative verb. UNLESS, ONLY IF, and EVEN IF can be used in conversation and in writing. They’re call commonly used. In fact, a fun conversational expression to learn is EVEN IF IT KILLS ME. We use this to express an intention or goal.

We use it to say that we’re going to do something no matter what. We’ll put all our effort into achieving it. We’ll pay any price. Tell me about it. That’s your homework task. Here’s my example: I’m going to learn to play this piece on the piano even if it kills me. It may take me a whole year to do it, but I’m determined! I look forward to reading your examples with this new expression “even if it kills me.”

The next pattern I’d like to study with you is in conditionals that don’t use the word IF or any word that looks like IF. Take a look. First of all, do these situations sound formal or informal? More formal, right? These are not casual situations. These are sentences you would hear or read in a work-related situation.

Second, can you easily identify which part of the sentence is the condition and which part is the result? The first part in each sentence is the condition. We don’t see the word IF, but we understand it. Look closely. What kind of word order do we have? A verb comes before the subject.

This is subject-verb inversion. Inverted word order in a conditional sentence is only possible with SHOULD, HAD (past perfect), and WERE (in an unreal condition). Here’s how those conditionals would look with regular sentence word order: Here’s the bonus task. See if you can rewrite the following sentences as inverted conditionals.

You can post your sentences in the comments, but I won’t offer corrections on this bonus task until the next lesson. That’s all for now.