Transcript: Hello and welcome back. This lesson is all about mixed conditionals.

It comes from a
request by three viewers – Przemek, Nihar (from Odisha, India) and Olivia Ornelas. Before we start,
if you want to request a lesson, just leave a comment. In your comment, tell me your name and I will
mention you in the video. Alright, so in this lesson, I will teach you about mixed conditionals in both
real and unreal situations (unreal means imaginary). There are exercises in this lesson for you to
understand and practice. OK first, let’s start with the most basic type of conditional – the real
conditional. Take a look at this example: “If it rains on Saturday, we’ll cancel the picnic.” So what do
you understand by that? Well, you know that there’s a picnic planned for Saturday, and if it rains, we
cannot go on the picnic, so we’ll cancel it. This is the most common type of conditional: on the
condition side – we call it a condition clause, you have ‘if’ plus the subject plus the verb in the
present simple tense. So, you have ‘if’ and ‘it rains’ which is present simple. On the result side (in the
result clause), you have ‘subject’ plus ‘will’. So – ‘we’ll cancel’ (or we will cancel) ‘the picnic.’ This is
called a real conditional. It’s also called the first conditional but the number is not important – what’s
important is that it talks about a real situation – a situation that is possible. So about mixed
conditionals? Well, the term ‘mixed’ just means that a sentence is in a different form – not the usual
form. So, you could say “If it rains on Saturday, we’ll have to cancel the picnic.” (so instead of will
plus the main verb, here you have ‘will have to’) or you could say “If it rains on Saturday, could you
bring some umbrellas?” or maybe I just saw the weather forecast on the news and I say “How are
we going to have a picnic if it rains on Saturday?” These are all correct, and they’re some examples
of mixed real conditionals. Remember: we say that they’re mixed because they’re not in the common
form. OK, let’s do a small exercise with this. Here are some sentences. But I’ve jumbled them up.
Stop the video, try to put them in the right order, then play the video again and check. Alright,
number one is “If you don’t mind, could you speak a little more slowly, please?” Number two is “If
Rob wants to get into a top university, he needs to work harder.” And number three is “When you
leave the house, remember to lock the front door.” In conditional sentences, it’s always OK to put the
if- clause last – if you did that, no problem. OK, notice, in number three – you have ‘when’ instead of
‘if’. The difference is that ‘if’ means something may happen or it may not happen – so “If you leave
the house,” would mean you may or may not leave the house. But ‘when’ expresses the idea that
you are going to leave the house (I’m sure), and when you leave the house, remember to lock the
front door. So you can see here that these are all mixed real conditionals – they all talk about real
situations but they’re in different forms. Let’s now move on and talk about unreal conditionals. What
do I mean by unreal? Unreal refers to situations that are imaginary. Take these two sentences: “If I
win the lottery, I will quit my job.” and “If I won the lottery, I would quit my job.” You will recognize the
first sentence as a real conditional. So imagine that I have bought a lottery ticket. And the results are
coming out tomorrow, so I have my fingers crossed, I hope I win. And if I win, I’ll go into my boss’s
office and say “I quit”. So you have ‘if’ and present simple in the condition, and ‘will’ in the result.