Indirect questions: rogat quid faciam

An indirect question reports a question: he asks what I am doing, I do not know why he came. Latin keeps the question word and puts the verb into the subjunctive: quid facis? becomes rogat quid faciam. The sequence of tenses picks which subjunctive.

Direct to indirect on one screen

The question word stays put; the verb becomes subjunctive, in the tense the main verb dictates.

Those six lines are the whole construction. Facturus is masculine because the speaker is; a woman would say factura sim.

Indirect questions are on the OCR GCSE Latin prescribed syntax list.

The sequence of tenses does the timing

Purpose clauses and indirect commands only look forward, so they use two tenses. An indirect question can ask about any time, so it uses four, plus a future.

The present row also serves the future and a perfect meaning have done; the past row serves the imperfect, the perfect meaning did and the pluperfect. Seen from a past main verb, the three times sit like this:

English shifts its tenses back after a past main verb too (he asked what I was doing), so translate the Latin subjunctive with the English tense that fits, and do not try to make it sound subjunctive.

Cicero's first speech against Catiline opens with a run of them, every one a perfect subjunctive because the main verb arbitraris is present:

Quid proxima, quid superiore nocte egeris, ubi fueris, quos convocaveris, quid consilii ceperis, quem nostrum ignorare arbitraris?

What you did last night and the night before, where you were, whom you called together, what plan you made: which of us do you think does not know? (Cicero, In Catilinam 1.1)