Free Direct and Indirect Speech Quiz – Practice Reported Speech
Read each quoted sentence and choose the option that correctly reports it in indirect speech. Get instant feedback on each choice. After answering all 5 questions correctly, detailed explanations will appear below each question to help you understand how tense, pronouns, and time words change. Test and learn in a simple and fun way.
Reporting What Someone Said Without Changing What They Meant
Direct speech repeats someone's exact words in quotation marks: she said, "I am tired." Indirect (reported) speech restates the same idea without quotation marks, and in the process, several things shift at once — the tense usually moves one step into the past, pronouns change to match the new speaker, and time or place words adjust ("today" becomes "that day," "here" becomes "there").
This is one of the few grammar topics where several rules apply simultaneously, which is exactly why learners find it harder than it looks. Getting the tense shift right but forgetting the pronoun change — or vice versa — is the single most common mistake, and it's exactly what this quiz is built to catch.
Reported speech isn't just an exam topic; it's what you use constantly in real conversation whenever you tell someone what another person said — retelling a conversation, summarising an email, or reporting instructions at work. Getting comfortable with it makes everyday storytelling noticeably smoother.
Work through each sentence by changing one element at a time — tense, then pronoun, then time reference — rather than trying to do all three at once in your head. Since voice changes are closely related, our Active and Passive Voice Quiz is a useful follow-up.