Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[saraleslie222]

a- I lost my cellphone yesterday.
b- I bought it last week.

Excuse me, if i want to combine the two sentences a and b above , is it okay to make it in this way

→ I lost my cellphone yesterday that I bought last week?

Actually, I don't know where I should put "yesterday" in the sentence. Do I put it in the right place in the sentence?

[Lorikeet]

[SimpleEnglishBlogger]

I would be very surprised to hear a native speaker say it that way. It's not wrong but I think a much more natural way to say it would be, "I lost the cell phone I bought last week yesterday."

No doubt, non-native speakers could easily get confused by this and perhaps even a few native speakers might snicker because putting "last week" and "yesterday" together would sound a bit funny (funny haha, not funny strange). You could put "yesterday" at the front for a clearer sentence. "Yesterday, I lost the cell phone I bought last week." The problem I have with this is that we normally put "yesterday" at the front if we want to stress WHEN we lost the phone.

All that said, the whole thing is rather unnatural. If you only have one cell phone, most people would just say, "I lost my (cell) phone yesterday." There is no need to specify when it was bought. However, if you have two cell phones, one you bought last week and one you bought last year, you might hear someone say, "I lost my new cell phone yesterday."

Trying to imagine a situation where anyone would specify a phone "that I bought last week", I can only imagine something like a person who bought a cell phone two weeks ago and another one last week. Both are new so the word "new" wouldn't help much. You have two so you need to specify which one somehow. If they were different models, you could just use the model type such as "iPhone", iPhone 6S" or "Samsung". So you would need to have bought two almost identical cell phones, and both relatively recently, in order to make the entire sentence appropriate.
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[saraleslie222]

Thank you for your replies. They help me a lot.

[Lorikeet]

If you just bought the cell phone last week and you already lost it, I think that's reason enough to mention the time frame. I think "Yesterday I lost the cell phone I bought last week" is better than "I lost the cell phone that I bought last week yesterday." for just the reason you mentioned. I see no problem with putting "yesterday" first.

[SimpleEnglishBlogger]

Yes, if the OP absolutely has to put those two sentences into one for an English assignment, then I'd probably go with that.

I'm just a big proponent of sounding natural and while it's indeed correct, I can't see a native speaker saying it that way. They could, and I'm sure that someone, somewhere, has. But a native speaker would be much more likely to say something like "Dammit! I lost my brand new phone yesterday! I just bought it last week!!" There are of course a couple dozen ways to say the same thing -- but still, smashing together those two sentences with all that information just doesn't seem natural to me.
_________________
Visit www.sloweasyenglish.com for material to help you with your listening skills!

All of the videos are in SLOW and EASY ENGLISH so they are easy to understand and will help you improve your listening until you can watch regular movies and TV!