Learn English Grammar: The 3rd Conditional

"If only I hadn't done that."

We use the third conditional to talk about regret, therefore, moaning and all that is

often in the third conditional.

Hello.

Welcome back.

My name is Benjamin.

Welcome to the channel.

Today's lesson is all about the third conditional, how to use it, getting more confident using

it.

Yep.

We're going to use it to talk about an imaginary past.

What if things had been different?

Yep.

So, you know, we don't want to overuse it because then we'll just be sad.

Yep.

But it can be quite a good conversational avenue to go down, so good to have up your

sleeve.

Okay.

You ready?

Let's go.

So we've got four conditional tenses in English.

The zero conditional talks about general truths, the first, a possible future; second, a likely

future.

Sorry.

We've got a possible future, second conditional, an unlikely future; and the third conditional

looks back, wishes things were different.

It's all about regret.

Oh, why did that happen, yeah?

There's a main clause and an if clause.

The main clause will look something like this, "I would have been happy."

Yep.

So we've got "would have" in the main clause.

If, that's like the kind of the seesaw point, if Tommy had given me some cake.

So we have the past perfect tense here, "had" plus past participle.

Had given me some cake.

Hmm, Tommy, why did you do that?

Regret.

Oh, I feel so bad about the past.

Okay, let's get some practice at using this.

I need to grab a pen, here.

If Hillary Clinton had won the election, Donald Trump would not, would not.

So we need some help.

If Hillary Clinton had won the election, so this is in the...

This is the if clause, here, yep.

That's past perfect.

Had won.

So what we're looking at, here, is the main clause.

So we need sort of "would have", would not have been elected president.

So we've got positive, we're imagining if something positive has happened, then this

negative thing wouldn't have happened.

If we reverse that round, I'm saying positive and negative in a strictly grammatical sense.

I'm not going to get too political right now.

What about the other way around?

If Trump had not won, so we're starting with the negative now, so if something negative

had not happened, the election, Clinton would, same, same tense, have been elected president.

Okay, time for much more practice, let's go.

So another way of thinking about the structure of the third conditional is as we always start

with the if, and then condition leading to a result.

So if such and such a thing hadn't happened, what would have been created?

I've got one, two, three, four sentences, and I've jumbled them around so we can try

and put them back together again, a bit like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall.

If we hadn't invited so many people to the party, what would have happened?

Could have avoided breaking down, emotional breaking down or traffic breaking down, no,

I don't think that's it.

You wouldn't have had to queue for so long.

North American, you say line instead of queue, no, it's not about queue.

Ah, something about food, that's about entertaining hospitality.

If we hadn't invited so many people to the party, if we had not invited, so they invited

loads of people to the party, what was the result?

We might not have had so little food, so we're imagining a different past.

We might not have had so little food, so this is going here.

If there were less people, people would have had more to eat, imagining a different past.

What about the next one?

If we had checked, if we had checked the traffic news, how would the past have been different?

We could have avoided breaking down, you wouldn't have, so we've got a different subject here,

but that's not going to work, is it, because look, we've got "we" here, so that's not it.

We might have avoided the traffic jam.

If we had checked the traffic news, modal, we might have avoided the traffic jam, okay?

Next one.

If we'd paid for priority boarding, so that's the premium service where you go to the front

of the queue, or at least you're meant to, what would have been different?

If we had paid that, you - ah, so we've changed it, haven't we?

We've changed the subject, so we need to make the subjects agree.

So, let's change this to "you'd".

If you'd paid for priority boarding, you wouldn't have had to queue for so long.

To queue, to queue, interesting spelling, isn't it?

Which leaves us with one more.

If we had checked what type of petrol it was, whoosh, another modal, "could", we could have

avoided breaking down.

Oh dear, they put the wrong petrol into the car.

I've done that before.

It's not fun.

Okay, I'd like you folks to have a bit more practice of the third conditional by doing

the quiz now.

Remember the rules of how the tense is formed, and good luck to you.

Now, remember, if you want to review the different conditional tenses, then I have already made

videos on the zero conditional, the first, the second, and a different one on the third.

So, do check those out as a means of expanding your grammatical awareness.

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See you in the next video.

And by the way, if you want any extra help with your English, honeyourenglish.com.