Practical uses of “if only” and “I wish”

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You may have been taught about wish clauses in English class, but are you using them in conversation? Here are a few contexts where you can show off with them. Remember: they are usually equivalent to “hopefully” and are almost always interchangeable, but if only is more intense.




Missing
Do you have someone special abroad? Here are a few phrases costa rica phone number list can use when talking to someone you miss and would like to see more of:

I wish you were here
I wish you could come sooner/more often
I wish we could see each other more
If only I could be there with you
If only you didn't live so far away
In colloquial conversation, we will tend to use contractions .



Expressing wishes in the past
How nice it would have been to know this before! When we want to explain that we would have liked something to have happened differently, we can use either the third conditional or the wish clauses :

I wish I had known
I wish I had seen it before
I wish I had finished it last night
If only you'd told him before! He wouldn't have stayed so long


Expressing wishes in the present
And what about when we dream about how well things would go if we had more time, more money, fewer worries…? These phrases also serve to wish that things were different in the present moment:

I wish I had more money so I could buy all of these books
I wish I could go with you, but I have to work
I wish I had more time to finish this project
If only I had less to do… I'm sure I would be happier


Complain
What do we do when something or someone is extremely annoying to us? We can use phrases like these. We can say them directly to the person or complain about them behind their back: