Someone has told me that she has stopped smoking. Later I catch her smoke and say:
I thought you'd/you had quit.
Would native speakers say "you'd" or would they say "you had" to not confuse it with "you would"?
Learn English – You’d or you had
idiomatic-language
Related Solutions
I think the simplest, yet most idiomatic way to say that in English would be this:
Cover her eyes with your hands.
Or, as was suggested by brichins down below, the sentence can be made even shorter:
Cover her eyes.
if it's implied that it is your hands that you're going to use to cover her eyes.
While you can do things with good manners, it is rare to direct someone to do so in imperatives. Unless addressing children, it is not required to remind people to be polite— a person with good upbringing has good manners out of habit; an poorly raised person cannot tell the difference, anyway.
This may reflect a difference of cultural perception, but I think more likely that it is simply a poor translation from Japanese. A search on "smoke with good manners" mostly returns results from Japan. Considerate would be the more idiomatic adjective to use to remind people to think of others, so a similar campaign in an English-speaking city might be please be a considerate smoker or please be considerate when smoking, phrasings which are common in such signs.
When speaking generally of politeness, consideration, and other positive social behavior, good manners are something you have, not something you do (as with one's habits or one's nature). Someone with good manners may be said to be well-mannered, and someone without good manners is ill-mannered; it is more usually expressed that someone has good manners, than that they do something with good manners.
Best Answer
You can always say 'I thought you had quit', but native speakers usually say 'I thought you'd quit'. G Warner explains that it more formal and might be considered confrontational.
As to whether 'I thought you'd [you had] quit' might be interpreted as 'I though you'd [you would] quit', the clue in this example is the previous conversation with your friend. You wrote 'Someone has told me she has stopped smoking'. Using the usual rules of indirect quotation, this means she actually said 'I have stopped smoking', not 'I will stop smoking', otherwise you would have said 'Someone has told me that she would stop smoking'. So this time when you meet, both of you have a (general) memory of that conversation.
That relies on knowing the previous conversation. If you simply say to me, 'I saw Betty smoking yesterday. I thought she'd quit', I don't know the previous conversation, and might just be caught between 'I thought she had quit' or 'I thought she would quit'. But as a native speaker of English, I will very quickly think that 'I thought she had quit' is a more likely interpretation than 'I thought she would quit'.
Conversation almost always has a context - who the people are, where they are talking, when they are talking and what has already been said or happened, either in this conversation or a previous one. We rely on clues from the context - in this case, the previous conversation.
Note that this issue only arises with a small number of verbs: the ones like put-put-put, hit-hit-hit or in this case quit-quit-quit, or come-came-come, become-became-become or run-ran-run. If you had stuck with 'stop', then your choice would have been 'I thought you'd stopped [< you had V-pp]' or 'I thought you'd stop [
One day in class I said to a student 'I wish you'd come earlier', which raises the same issue.