How does the indirect statement work?

The indirect statement is something that always confuses students in Latin, but once you've grasped what it actually means it becomes a lot easier. Indirect speech is the type of speech used to communicate something that is reported. Therefore you can after identify it if the sentence starts with "I said that," or "he reported that." In Latin, reported speech uses the accusative and the infinitive. What this means is that the subject of the reported speech - who is doing the action - goes into the accusative, and the verb is translated by the infinitive. Let's look at an example: I said that the girl was good = dixi puellam bonam esse. The direct statement is "the girl is good." Therefore the girl, as the subject of this direct statement, goes into the accusative, while the verb "is" goes into the infinitive, the tense of this infinitive determined by the tense that it was in the original direct speech.