Subjunctive clause

Question

1.If I were you ,I would learn English well .

2.If you were here yesterday ,you whould meet him .

3.The meeting will be put off if it rains tomorrow .

4.If you followed the doctor's advice, you would be better now

is it right? thanks for your response

Novalee · Accepted Answer

All of them are right except for (2). We can consider a context in which a person wasn't in a place yesterday so he/she wasn't able to meet "him". As it is a condition in the past (yesterday) we can use a conditional clause type III.

If you had been here yesterday, you would have met him

Be careful with tenses here. In the conditional clause we see a past perfect tense and in the main clause we use a perfect conditional tense (in this type III conditional clause).

(1) and (4) are considered type II and (3) is considered type I conditional clause.

Hope this helps

Anonymous · Answer

2.  If you had been here yesterday , you would have met him.

Anonymous · Answer

I think this applies to (4) as well: If you had followed the doctor's advice, you would be better now.

Anonymous · Answer

These statements are actually conditional, and not subjunctive.
Subjunctive statements place the emphases on the speaker, rather than the subject, like this:
I wish her were dead!
I insisted that she be here.

The grammar in these, other than #2 as stated in the previous reply, are correct, though.

Think of a conditional like this:
It has a condition. It's an if/then statement.
If (this), then (this.)
If I want to go to a good college, I should study hard.
If I wanted to make dinner at home, I should have bought groceries.
He could be a professional baseball player if he ran faster.
The meeting will be put off if it rains tomorrow.

If you see could, should, or would, the statement is often a conditional. Sometimes the if is implied.
You should clean your room.
(if you want to impress your girlfriend. if you don't want your mom mad at you.)
We don't say the if phrase, but it's there.

We don't often use subjunctive in modern American, but I'm not sure about other forms of English. "I wish he would leave me alone," and similar sentences are the only ones I can think of. When I was a child, they seemed to be use more. That was about 30 years ago. Now, instead of "I insisted she be here," we would probably say "I told her she had to come." Sentences like the first seem more formal to me, and perhaps that's why we don't use them as much now.

CalifJim · Answer

1.If I were you ,I would learn English well . OK.

2.If you ~~were~~ had been here yesterday ,you ~~whould meet~~ would have met him .
3.The meeting will be put off if it rains tomorrow . OK.

4.If you (had) followed the doctor's advice, you would be better (by) now. OK.

Your placement of punctuation marks is wrong. Place the comma or period immediately after a word, then leave a space. Don't put a space before the punctuation mark.

If I were you, I would ... not If I were you ,I would ...

CJ

CalifJim · Answer

AnonymousI wish her were dead!

No. It's I wish she were dead!

Anonymous"I wish he would leave me alone," and similar sentences are the only ones I can think of.

Actually, the use of would is a sure sign that the subjunctive is not being used.

CJ

Anonymous · Answer

I sugest:

1.If I were you, I would learn English well. (Original wsa correct apart from some spacing.)

2.If you had been here yesterday, you would have met him.

3.The meeting will be put off if it rains tomorrow.

4.If you had followed the doctor's advice, you would be better now.

Subjunctive clause

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