If I Were You
By Angela Arlia

aaaaAs I stand in front of my ESL class each day and teach my pupils grammar, I'm often asked why they have to learn English grammar if most Americans don't speak English correctly. Although I want to ram my head into a wall every time they ask me this, instead, I reply "Just because Americans don't speak correctly doesn't mean you should speak incorrectly." Yes, I know, my reply sounds like your parents when they asked, "If your friends jump off a bridge, would you too?" But it's true. aaaaHonestly, what upsets me most about this situation is that my students are right. Most Americans don't speak English correctly! How are they supposed to take learning English seriously when even our commander-in-chief, the leader of the free world, doesn't speak English correctly? (My apologies; I was just watching CNN.) aaaaThis whole discussion began when I was teaching my class about present and future unreal conditionals. Conditional statements are those that contain "if." (You can also think of them as hypothetical statements if that term makes more sense to you.) Now, I love conditional statements because they are fun--you can give full
reign to your imagination and discuss the many things you would do given a specific situation. What is fabulous about these unreal conditionals is that most of the situations are impossible, untrue or imagined. So you can create sentences like, "If I met Johnny Depp, I would kiss him for hours." Or something like that. aaaaBut I digress a bit. In these unreal conditionals, whenever you use the verb "to be" no matter which subject, it should be conjugated as "were." Let me elucidate a bit. The construction should be, "If I were you" or "If Jimmy were happy" or "If she were skinny," regardless of who is the subject of this "if-then" construction. The verb is always conjugated "were." aaaaI'm sorry to say that many, many English speakers employ this construction on a regular basis, to give advice or to otherwise form an unreal conditional sentence, by saying, "If I was you."	aa
NOPE! Incorrect!! It should be "If I were you." Why? Simply because it's the rule. This type of tense is similar to the subjunctive tense in many other languages and it requires a different conjugation in English. You are creating an unreal situation; therefore the verb does not follow the same predictable pattern as it does when conjugated in the other tenses. (And FYI, the verb "to be" is really the only time you notice this altered verb construction when forming unreal conditional sentences. So you don't need to worry that you're committing a faux pas every time you use the word "if.") aaaaSo now that we all know how to correctly construct and conjugate a conditional statement, let's practice a little. I'm going to start with that Johnny Depp conditional I mentioned earlier….