Cartoon of Mafalda, one of Quino’s greatest characters.

Sometimes we report what another person has said (or what we have said), we tell something that was said before or we imagine future comments. Basically all these things can be expressed in two possible ways in Spanish:

a) by repeating the exact words literally:

– Y entonces me dijo: «¡Te quiero mucho!»

b) by using similar sentences, according to your point of view:

– ¡Y entonces me dijo que me quería mucho!

In this blog post we are going to explain these two uses, the direct speech (estilo directo) (a) and the reported speech (estilo indirecto) (b), so that you can learn how to distinguish them and use them in a basic way.

Firstly, what verbs do we need to use? The so-called verbos de habla (reporting verbs):

Some of the most common verbs in direct and reported speech in Spanish are:

decir, comentar, afirmar, explicar, manifestar, indicar…

Hey! Paradoxically, the verb hablar is not a reporting verb, at least in the Spanish spoken in Spain, so you cannot use it neither in direct nor in indirect speech 🙂

Besides, not all of the verbs mentioned above can be used in direct speech and not all of them have exactly  the same meaning. That’s why you cannot used them in all cases. Apart from this, there are other reporting verbs with different meanings, such as:

negar, escribir, preguntar, responder o contestar, aconsejar, proponer, susurrar, pensar…

Do you know what they mean in your language? 😉

Le’ts have a deeper look at these two forms:

el estilo directo:

In the direct speech (estilo directo), words are reported exactly as you have listened to them. This is the simplest use, because you don’t have to change anything. In this case, we have two independent sentences, as you saw in (a):

1.  the one containing the reporting verb,
2.  the words we repeat or report (the quote), which must be written between inverted commas (» «).

For this reason, we have to use a colon (:) between both sentences. If the order is the opposite (as in a.2), we use a comma (,). Regarding pronunciation, we stress the quote modulating our voice to say it exactly the way it was said; we even sometimes change our tone of voice trying to «imitate» the person who gave the quote… Even when it was you (because it is not a sign of mockery).

a.1) Y entonces me dijo: «¡Te quiero mucho!» .

a.2) «¡Te quiero mucho!«, me dijo entonces.

el estilo indirecto:

The reported speech (estilo indirecto) is a little bit more complex, since it has more variations, tenses, etc. That’s why we will talk about it in depth in a future post. However, regarding writing, it is easier indeed, because the quote does form part of the introducing sentence. For this reason, we don’t need any kind of specific punctuation, although it is necessary to use «que» (or sometimes «si«, as in b.2). Also, we must adapt the tense and the person to the moment of speaking. This may seem rather complicated, but we can easily see it in these examples (b):

b.1) ¡Y entonces me dijo que me quería mucho!

b.2) Y entonces le pregunté si me quería mucho…

The orginal sentence for b.1 is: «Te quiero mucho». To build the reported speech form here we have changed the tenses (from the present to the past, since the moment is different) and the person, both in the pronoun (te instead of me) and in the verb (él, in quería, instead of yo, in quiero). The original sentence in b.2 is: «¿Me quieres mucho?». Here we only needed to use si and change the verb.

We hope this post may have helped you!

🙂

And that you say to us: «¡Muchas gracias, escuela habla!»