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Well hey there I’m Emma from mmmEnglish.

Tell me have you ever wished that a situation

from the past had been different?

Maybe you wished that you’d behave differently

or wished that you’d said yes to something

that you didn’t?

Of course, you have! This is part of being human, isn’t it?

We all go through it.

So I know that you are going to love today’s lesson.

Today we are going to dive deep on some

awesome grammar, the third conditional.

Now I hope you’re not eye-rolling on me.

Yes this is a grammar lesson but it’s an incredibly useful

one to talk about our regrets and our disappointments.

Sounds kind of grim, doesn’t it?

There are lots of useful ways to learn and practise

with this grammar structure and I don’t know about you

but I’m excited to get started. Let’s go!

Now you probably know that there are several types

of conditional sentences in English.

I’ve made lessons about many of them already.

But like all conditional sentences,

the third conditional has two clauses.

The ‘if’ clause and the main clause.

But unlike the zero, the first and the second conditionals

this one talks about the past and specifically

an unreal past, not a true past, an unreal one.

We use the third conditional to imagine a situation

in the past and the

imaginary result which is also in the past, okay?

So it’s imaginary. It’s not real, it’s not true okay

because we can’t change the past.

Sometimes we wish we could but we can’t.

So that’s why you’ll often hear the third conditional

being used to talk about regrets,

things that we wish were different.

So let’s look at a few examples to get started.

If I had left earlier, I wouldn’t have missed my flight.

So I’m a bit upset about that, right?

I’m upset I missed my flight.

I wish that I had have left my house a little bit

earlier and not run late.

I wish that I could go back in time and be on the plane

but I can’t because my flight’s gone. There’s nothing

that I can do about it now except buy another ticket.

Well we can use the third conditional to show

how angry or how frustrated we are

about this situation, right?

Now look if you hadn’t been so rude,

they would have invited you back.

You were rude?

Obviously, that didn’t work out well for you, did it?

Now they’re not going to invite you back

again in the future.

You can’t go back and change it now, can you?

Whether you want to or not so

I’m just gonna use the third conditional now to

tell you off.

If I hadn’t been going so fast,

I wouldn’t have been fined.

Yeah I got fined which is annoying but

it’s already happened. I can’t change it now, right?

That’s something you definitely can’t change.

So we use the third conditional to talk about

things that we regret,

things that we wish we could change about the past

and also to tell someone off

for something that they did in the past.

So it’s pretty useful, right? It’s a really handy structure

to have up your sleeve, to know.

All right so let’s talk about what it looks like now.

So to make the third conditional, we need a few things.

We need ‘if’ and the past perfect.

Then we need a comma and then we need

the perfect conditional.

You might be wondering what the heck is the past

perfect or the perfect conditional?

So think about it this way. The past perfect is subject

with ‘had’ and the past participle verb.

If I had left earlier.

If you hadn’t been so rude.

If I hadn’t been going so fast.

Okay these are all examples of the past perfect.

Now the perfect conditional is subject

with ‘would have’ and the past participle verb.

So it’s just the present perfect with ‘would’ in front of it.

I wouldn’t have missed my flight.

They would have invited you back.

I wouldn’t have got that ticket.

So let’s put the third conditional altogether.