 I'm doing great! Thanks for asking! In order to learn English well, you need to study hard. Mark said that in order to learn English well, one needs to study hard. Is Sam concentrating on pronunciation for his oral exam? He asked if Sam was concentrating on pronunciation for his oral exam. Speak louder! I can't hear you! He asked him to speak louder. She couldn't hear him. This lesson will delve into the speech, so stay tuned. If you want to watch that lesson, you may click here. Now, what is the difference between direct or indirect or reported speech? Well, direct speech is what I'm doing right now. I'm talking to you. Direct. I gave you the first example in order to learn English well, you need to study hard. This is what I'm saying to you. Now, if you want to report this to a friend of yours, you can say, Mark said that in order to learn English well, one needs to speak harder. I will explain in detail in just a few minutes. But when do we use the indirect or reported speech? Actually, when you want to report what somebody said, and it's used a lot in journalism, obviously. So, in journalism, if you want to report a politician or a celebrity, you will use the reported speech. Now, it's important that you know every tense in English, and you know them well, because we're going to use them all in this lesson. So, if you haven't, don't watch this lesson. Watch the other lessons about the other tenses. And this, once you've done, you've known all the tenses, all the English tenses. So, I want you to concentrate on this part, though, because I'm going to tell you which verbs we use when we report. The verbs are ask, or answer, or say, or tell, like I use it here. Demand, insist, illustrate, advise, agree, decide, apologize, recommend, suggest, remind, etc. Now, I'm going to be back, I'm going to erase this, and I'm going to be back with some rules. Okay, so we're back with the rules. Pay attention to the tenses that you're going to use, because in the reported speech, we usually take the tense back. What do I mean by that? If we have a sentence with a present simple, for example, we can make the reported speech into the past simple. So, if we have a present continuous, for example, we take it to a past continuous, and so on. I listed an example with a past simple. So, if we had a direct sentence, I was, I can say, I was at the cinema last night. If you want to report a sentence, you have to take the tense back. So, if you want to say this to a friend of yours about me, he said, or Marc said, he had been so past perfect at the cinema the previous night. I'm going to explain this in a second. If you want to get a list of all the tenses with a reported speech, you should click here to look at my lesson again about reported speech. Now, let's look at the second rule. Change pronouns, adverbs, and expressions of time, like the one that I just explained to you just before. So, last night goes to a previous night, or the previous night. This month, the reported speech would be that month. I, he, or she. This would go to that. Now would go to them, and so on. So, now let's take a look at the third rule. If we're talking about general truths, they never change tense. So, we leave the tense as it is, usually the present simple. Just like my introductory example. In order to learn English well, you need to study hard. This is an advice that I give you. You can report this sentence to your friends, and say, Marc said that in order to learn English well, one, anyone, everyone, needs to study hard. This is always true. It never changes. It's a general truth. Now, for example, another I can say to you, I speak English, Italian, Spanish, and French. So, if you want to report this to a friend, you may say, Marc said that he speaks, so they never change the sentence, the tense, sorry, the tense never changes. He speaks, obviously you have to change the pronoun, from I to he, English, Italian, Spanish, and French. So, here we have the two last rules. Questions. What happens to questions? Well, actually, questions turn into positive sentences. So, for a yes or no question, you need to add if to the reported speech. Let's look at my example. Is Samuel concentrating on pronunciation for his oral exam? So, this is a question that I'm asking you. Direct speech. So, the reported speech, so something that you would say to a friend of yours, he said he asked, sorry, in this case he asked, because it's a question he asked if, so if sentence, Samuel, subject, then auxiliary in this case, was concentrating, and here I made a mistake because I forgot the G, was concentrating on pronunciation for his oral exam. Remember that we have here the present continuous, so to report that, we need to take it back, one tense, obviously, past continuous. So, he asked if Samuel was, because it's the present, in the reported speech, we take the tense back, so was concentrating on pronunciation for his oral exam. So, the last rule that I'm going to talk about is about imperatives. So, imperatives take two plus verb. Let's look at my example. Speak louder. I can't hear you. This is what I'm saying directly to you, or somebody else, in this case, she, maybe Mary. She demanded, and here I used the verb demand, because I want to stress the fact that she insisted, she demanded, him, because she's talking to a boy, she demanded him, and two, to speak louder, and here is the imperative, to speak louder, and then we continue with the sentence, can't would go to couldn't, because it's the past of can. She, because it's the subject of the sentence, she couldn't hear who, him, the boy, him, okay, not you, obviously. Now, let's recap. You need to remember five rules. Usually, the tense goes back one tense. So, for example, if you have the past simple, it will turn to a past perfect, or a present simple would go to a past simple. Questions turn into positive sentence. Yes or no questions turn into a positive sentence, adding if. Let me tell you that if you want to watch another lesson on this topic, you can click here. Thank you very much for watching. If you want to post your own example of the reported speech, you may do so by typing it under this video. If you haven't subscribed to my channel, please do so. You'll get one lesson every week, so don't forget to do that. And if you haven't shared any of my lessons, please do so. It would really help me. Okay, thank you very much, and I'll see you next week. Take care, bye-bye.