English · Chapter 8 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Reported speech
How to tell someone what another person said - 'she said she was tired' - and the way the tense shifts back one step when you report it.
The short version
A reported question is not a question any more
Reported questions go back to statement word order, with no inversion and no auxiliary do. The tense moves onto the main verb, so do you live becomes I lived. For yes or no questions there is no question word, so you join the clause with if or whether instead.
She asked where I lived.
Tell needs a person, say does not take one
The rule is mechanical. Tell must be followed by a person: tell me, tell her, told the class. Say is not followed by a person directly, so if you want to name the listener you have to add to. He said me he was late is wrong twice over, and it is a very common slip.
He told me he was late.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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