Le discours rapporté : transposer temps, pronoms et repères

Unité GR-35 · campagne 17 · hier devient la veille : tout le décor se déplace.

GR-30 gave you the tense machine. Reporting speech well means running three transpositions at once: tenses (already installed), pronouns (automatic once you see them), and — the part everyone forgets — the time and place markers. When the reporting verb is past, demain is no longer tomorrow relative to you, so French renames it.

So « Je pars demain » becomes il a annoncé qu'il partait le lendemain — tense shifted and marker renamed. Russian pushes against the second half too: он сказал, что уезжает завтра keeps завтра untouched, just as it keeps the tense. In French, leaving demain in a past report is as wrong as leaving the present tense.

Two sentence types do not use que at all:

1. Orders: the imperative becomes de + infinitive. « Viens me voir ! » → Elle m'a demandé de venir la voir. No subjunctive, no que — the infinitive construction is the neutral way to report a command.
2. Questions: est-ce que disappears and the word order returns to subject-verb. « Où habites-tu ? » → Elle m'a demandé où j'habitais. Yes/no questions take si : Il m'a demandé si je venais.

Pronouns simply follow the logic of who is speaking now: *« Je t'aime » → il lui a dit qu'il **l'*aimait. Read the reported sentence back and check that every I/you/here/tomorrow has been re-anchored to the reporter.

The practice mixes markers, an order, and a reported question.

Loading the exercise...

Checking your progress...