The second conditional

Good afternoon,

I hope you are all having a nice week. It is being rainy and cold outside, but I love it! It reminds me of my time in England...

Anyway, I wanted to talk today about the second conditional. Firstly, when do we use it?

We use the second conditional to talk about something that is not very likely to happen. If you remember well, the first conditional expresses a high posibility or chance of something to occur. Meanwhile for the first conditional the percentage was around 90% of the situation to happen, in this case we are talking about a 10% or even less. Then, we can state that we use the second conditional for talking about hypothetical situations. 

Let's see an example. In Spanish, for expressing this type of condition, you would say something like this: "si ganase la lotería, dejaría mi trabajo", which in English would be "if I won the lottery, I would quit my job". As you know, there is not a big chance of winning the lottery, but it might still happen. In that case, then, we use the second conditional.

How is the structure? As we mentioned in previous posts, there are two clauses:

Clause number 1: the condition, which you make with "if + verb in past simple"

Clause number 2: the result, which you make with the conditional simple tense (would).

In the example we saw before, first we have the condition "If I won the lottery" and later the result "I would quit my job", both separated by a comma. Remember that if you do not want to use the comma, you will need to invert the clauses, as it follows:

If I won the lottery, I would quit my job (with a comma)

OR

I would quit my job if I won the lottery (without comma)

It is also worth to mention that with the second conditional we use after the preposition "if" the subjunctive form of the verb to be with the personal pronouns I, he, she, it. That means that we use the form "were" instead of "was". For example, when giving advice to someone:

If I were you, I would buy the red car.

instead of:

If I was you, I would buy the red car.

Understood? Yes? Well, I would like you to have a look at the following power point presentation from slideshare and think about what you would do in those situations... For answering, you will need to reply to the questions (orally) using the second conditional! This HOMEWORK is for the 12th of December.

PS: remember to click on the image to be redirected to the ppt!

De CoRegistros - http://coregistros.com, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46900419 

Peace,

Pablo.