Learn how to use the modal verbs WILL and WOULD correctly in this lesson. Also see - MOST COMMON MISTAKES IN ENGLISH & HOW TO AVOID THEM: • 50 MOST COMMON MISTAKE...
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Transcript:
‘Will’ and ‘would’. These two verbs cause a lot of confusion for English learners. So, in this video, I’m going to clear up that confusion for you. I will teach you the difference between these two modal verbs, and I’ll show you how to use them correctly without making mistakes. As always, there is a quiz at the end to test your understanding. Alright, there are three main differences between ‘will’ and ‘would’. Let’s start with the most basic use of the two verbs. We use the verb ‘will’ to talk about the future. One very common use is to make a prediction, or say what we expect to happen in the future. Take this sentence: We will be in Hong Kong by 8 pm tomorrow. That means, we are traveling to Hong Kong and I expect that if our flight is on time, we will be there by 8 o’ clock tomorrow night. This next sentence also talks about the future but it’s a little different. I’m not hungry, so I will just have an orange juice. Imagine that you’re sitting in a restaurant with a friend and you say this. Here, you’re not talking about the distant future, you’re talking about the immediate future. In other words, here ‘will’ is used to express a decision that you have made. We also use ‘will’ to make a promise to someone: I’ll send you all the details by email. So, I’m promising to do something for you. OK, so that’s ‘will’. What about ‘would’? Well, ‘would’ is simply the past tense form of ‘will’. So imagine that we didn’t reach Hong Kong by 8 pm. Our flight was late. We only reached there at 2 in the morning. So then, we might look back at the past and say: We thought we would be in Hong Kong by 8 pm. But that didn’t happen. We often use ‘would’ when we report a past conversation - that is, we say what someone said in the past. For example: I wasn’t hungry, so I said that I would just have an orange juice. It’s the same sentence that we saw with ‘will’, but changed to the past tense. And the last sentence becomes: She said she would send me all the details by email. OK, now you know the basic use of ‘will’ and ‘would’. So let’s look at a more challenging use of these two verbs. This is the area of most confusion for people, and it is conditionals. That means sentences where you have a condition and a result. For example: If it rains tomorrow, I’ll bring my umbrella. That’s pretty easy. You see that I’m talking about something I will do in the future (“I’ll bring my umbrella”), but only on one condition - “if it rains.” Here’s another one: If Jared stops playing video games, his grades will improve. What do you understand by that? Well, it means that Jared probably spends a lot of time playing video games, so his grades are not very good. But if he stops playing video games, then he can spend more time studying, and we expect that his grades will improve. In both of these sentences, we’ve used ‘will’. And that is because both of these are real situations (these are both possible). This type of sentence is called the first conditional. But sometimes, we want to talk about imaginary or unreal situations. For example: If I had wings, I would fly all over the world. Obviously, this is not possible. I can’t grow wings, so all I’m doing is I’m using my imagination. Notice that we have used the past tense throughout this sentence - ‘If I had wings,’ - ‘I would fly’. We’re not talking about the past, but this past tense, including ‘would’, just shows that this is not real - it’s imaginary. Now, let’s go back to Jared and his video game addiction. What if I said: If Jared stopped playing video games, his grades would improve. It’s similar to the sentence with ‘will’, but using the past tense (with ‘would’) just shows that I don’t think this is possible. Jared is not going to stop, he’s just going to keep playing video games, and his grades are never going to improve. Remember, with ‘will’ it’s possible, with ‘would’ it’s not possible, it’s imaginary. And this type of sentence is called the second conditional. But there’s one more - the third conditional. This is used to talk about past conditions. Imagine that Jared had his exam, and as we expected, his grades were poor. So then we can say: If Jared had stopped playing video games, his grades would have improved. So here, we’re talking about a condition in the past. Notice that we say ‘had stopped’ (this is the past perfect tense) in the condition, and we use ‘would have’ in the result.