蜜芽传媒

Yassine
Hello. My name is Yassine. I come from Algeria.

I always when I want to talk about, when I want to tell a story, I get confused between the use of 'say' and 'tell'. For example, I say "my friend said me to go to the cinema this weekend". It's not true, is it?

Helen
Grammar. Now I love grammar, much more than writing this report. 'Say' and 'tell', now that is quite a common mistake. Now we're looking at reported speech here. So the important thing to remember is that if we use 'say' we don't normally include the object. So the person spoken to. Like this:

So we don't say "my friend said me that…". We say "my friend said that…"

But if we use 'tell', then we do need the object: "my friend told me that…"

So there you are. But then, you knew that already, didn't you?

Yassine
Let's try. "My friend told me to join him at the cinema". Thank you.

Helen
One more thing. You will often hear this in English: "So my friend was like 'I'm making pizza tonight' and I'm like 'Great. I love pizza'. The word 'like' is being used to mark reported speech. The form is the verb 'to be' plus 'like'. So, my boss told me to finish this report by 4pm and I was like 'Fine, as long as you stop interrupting me'.

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