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Hi there. This is Harry and this is the fourth podcast of the week, so thanks for joining me. In the fourth one we're going to look again at some grammar here. We're going to look at indirect questions. What are they on, how we create them on, why do we create them? There are two types of questions. Direct and indirect. A direct question is usually what is your name? How did you get here? Who are you?
Okay, so very direct and often can sound a little bit rude if we don't want to sound rude and we want to give somebody a good feeling or and D , D do you want to come across? Well then we change those direct questions into indirect questions and to do it is quite simple. We just add some words or phrases at the beginning which takes the stress away from the who, what, where, when and turns them into indirect questions. So you sound more polite and people are more likely to answer your question .
So, particularly if you're a foreigner to English shores and you want to find some place, hotel, bank, airport, whatever it is, try and make your questions indirect. You're more likely to get a response more likely to get a positive response. So let me give you these examples. Direct question. Where is the post office? So if you stopped somebody in the street and asked them, where's the post office, they might look at you, they probably would help you, eh , but it's not so polite.
Change it into an indirect question. Could you tell me where the post office is? Could you tell me where the post office is? Much, much more polite, much more likely to get you a positive response and be very careful here when you see the direct question, where is the post office note where the word is, where is okay. But when we use the indirect question is goes to the very end of the sentence. Could you tell me where the post office is? Question marks .
So that's a really critical part of these indirect questions. The verb, the um , verb changes its position in case of this is just something that is a really important, because if you say it in another way, then it'll , it sounded a little bit strange and people will know that you're not a native speaker. So direct question, where is the post office? Indirect. Could you tell me where the post office is? Second example, has John been invited to the party direct?
Has John invited to the party indirect? Do you know if John has been invited to the party? Do you know if John has been invited to the party? Indirect more likely to get you a nice response. And again, here, look at where the, the verb is. Has John at the very beginning of the sentence, has John been invited to the party? And in the indirect question, do you know if John has been invited? It's position changes. Do you know if John has been invited?
Okay. And then the third example, how does this work? So you're looking at some piece of machinery or mobile phone or some bit of technology and you just ask somebody, how does this work? Sounds very rude. It's grammatically correct. It's a direct question. If we want to turn that into an indirect question, could you please explain how this works? Could you please explain how this works? Very indirect, very polite, and very definitely likely to get you the answer that you want.
Could you explain how this works? And again, let's see . Um, what we've done with it. The word order. How does this work? How does this work? Could you explain how this works? Okay. You can see that, eh, this, eh has changed and works has changed. It's , it's a position in the sentence. How does this work work, this work at the end of the sentence, could you explain how this works please? It's not at the end of the sentence. It's changed its position. Okay, so really important.
When we use a , we want to ask questions that we try and avoid direct questions where possible with it when the artist who, what, when, how, because the can come across as a little bit impolite even though you may not intend it that way. That's often how they sound. Just by adding some nice phrases. Would you mind? Could you please, could I ask you, is it possible? Do you know that all of those expressions change the sentence immediately into an indirect question?
Okay, so that's our podcast for this week. Thanks again for listening. I hope you enjoyed them. And as always, if you want to get me, you can get me on www.englishlessonviaskype.com very happy to answer your questions. And if you have any comments to make I lows , read them and get back to you. And as always, when you get onto the webpage , you can see the link to the easy peasy club. If you have any friends or colleagues that you think might benefit from it, well let them know.
Okay, John again soon. Thanks for listening.
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