Past Perfect

Hello! This lesson is about the past perfect. Before we even get started, I’m going to begin with a warning: learners often overuse this tense. Now, you should understand it, and you should be able to use it, but I have found that a lot of my students, once they have learned it, they use it much more than they should. We don’t use the past perfect very often – only in certain specific situations. I have a theory as to why my students like to use this, is that English is hard, and grammar is hard, and if something is complicated, then it must be right. I’m not sure because I can’t get into their heads, but I think at a certain level a lot of my students think of the past perfect that way: it’s difficult, so it must be right. Okay, I I admire your work ethic, that’s great, but no and again, we don’t use the past perfect very often; this should not be the first verb tense that you study at all. Anyway, let’s get started. We’re going to start with the form, which is how to make the past perfect, and then we are going to look at the function, which is how to use it. At the end of this video, I have a little quiz for you. Okay let’s get started. We’ll start with positive sentences. So the good news is that this really – despite what I said a minute ago – this really isn’t that complicated. We put the subject, we put the auxiliary verb had, and then we put the past participle. So I had wanted, you had taken, she had thought. Not complicated at all to make it. We can make it a little bit more complicated by making it simpler. We can put those words together and we have contractions. I’d for I had, she’d for she had, etc. You can do this as long as the writing that you’re doing at the time isn’t formal. Okay let’s continue with negative sentences. So we’ll go back to where we were and we will just add a not. I had not wanted she had not taken, etc. And again, we can use a contraction: you hadn’t thought, they hadn’t worn. For yes/no questions, we go back to where we were at the beginning. I had wanted, and we just invert, or reverse, the auxilary and the subject. Now this is the beginning of the sentence, so really I should have our – whoops – so really I should have a capital H here but you get the point. For WH questions, all I need to do is to just slide that whole thing over and add a question word. So it really isn’t that complicated. to use the past perfect. It feels a little bit fancy, maybe because we’ve got the the extra auxiliary, but it really isn’t that complicated. Here is where people have trouble, though, which is with the function – how to use the past perfect. So again, the past perfect is not… the past perfect is not better than other past verb tenses, okay? It doesn’t show that you’ve learned English any better. You have to use it in the right way and the past perfect is not for actions that happened a long time ago. Many of my students have told me that their teachers told them that we use the past perfect for things that happened a long time ago. That can be true, but that’s not a good way to think of it because we can also use them [it] for things that have happened quite recently. It depends how we are thinking of the situation, and how we are telling the story, not when the story happened. So, the past perfect is used to tell about an action that happened in the past – and this is the key – before another action which is also in the past. Okay I’m going to put this on a timeline to make it a little bit easier for us to talk about. So we see here my timeline. I’ve got past on the left, future on the right, and then I’ve got now, which isn’t in the middle because we’re talking about the past in this video. Here I have two past actions. I’m going add one more feature to this timeline before we get started, which is days of the week. I think days of the week is just a nice easy way to to explain this because we’re all very familiar with them. Just to be clear, this Monday and Wednesday and Friday are all from the same week. I’m not playing tricks, they’re not from different weeks. All right, let’s take a look. Normally we would tell a story like this from the beginning to the end. Normally we would say, for example, I bought a cake on Monday then I ate it on Wednesday. Now, this is today; this is now, this is Friday, okay? So Wednesday’s in the past and Monday is also in the past so two things in the past, but you notice that I’m telling the story this way through time. I bought it on Monday and I ate it on Wednesday. I’m starting at the furthest time in the past and I’m coming closer towards now, but what happens if I want to do this? If I want to tell the story the other way? Let’s take a look here. I ate a cake on Wednesday. So far, that’s essentially the same: I ate a cake on Wednesday. But now, what do I do to get to here? What do I do to get to Monday? This is where we use the past perfect… that I had bought on Monday. I think you can agree with me Monday is not a long long time ago in the past. It was only a few days ago, okay? So it doesn’t matter how long ago it was in the past; it just matters how we’re telling the story. I had bought it on Monday. Let’s look at some more examples: On Wednesday – now remember today is Friday – today is Friday’s so we’re going back in time. On Wednesday, she sold – so I’m using the past simple – the bread that she had baked – I’m going further in the past – had baked on Monday. It was Wednesday. My bike had – so it’s Friday as I’m speaking – I’m talking about something that happened on Wednesday, so the time and focus is now Wednesday, so from Wednesday, my bike had been broken since Monday. From Wednesday, my bike had been broken since Monday. So by, Wednesday my bike being broken was already in the past. So we have seen that the past perfect is used to tell about an action that happened in the past before another action which is also in the past. But be careful – the first action can be long.Tthe key is to think about what happened before what else happened. So again, we’ll go back to our timeline. Here we’ve got two past actions. Now, this… these X’s suggest that these are things that happened on one day, so for example: she baked the bread, she sold the bread. Those are quite short actions, but I can also think of it this way: instead of being a short, one day action, I can think of it being a much longer action, as well. That’s what this slide is about. Before I visited Germany – okay, so this is now, okay? Visiting Germany is already in the past, okay, but before that, I had studied for a long time. Before I visited Germany I had studied German for three years. Bob’s retirement was very fancy and expensive. Obviously the retirement party is over because we’re using the past simple. He had worked at that company for almost 20 years. So again, this is a longer time, this 20 years; it’s not a short thing. Before that, he had studied at University for seven years, before that… So you can see here what the past perfect does is it allows us to tell the story backwards, okay? All right, let’s take a look at the little quiz that I have for you. So I’m going to put up some questions, and I want you to decide which action in the sentences came first and which came second. Okay, here are the sentences, so take a look, turn the video off, and figure out which action happened before which other action. I’ll come back in a moment and I’ll give you the answers. Okay, so, let’s take a look. I’m going to put up a table here that has the answers. So we can see in each sentence which action happened first and which happened second. So we’ll go through a few of them. They had already seen that movie when we asked them to come with us. So first they had seen the movie and then we asked them to come with us. Okay so they saw it first and then we asked them. Number 2: She boiled the carrots she had chopped. Well yeah, this one’s a little bit easier maybe to see because it’s logical: you chop the carrots and then you boil them. Number 3: He had already told her by the time I met her. So I met her and I told her, but before I met her and I told her, he had already told her. So he told her first, and then I met her and then I told her, okay? All right, so I hope you get the idea. So if you’d like some more practice, look below this video. There’s some more exercises for you to do to make sure that you really have the past perfect. And again, remember, the most important thing isn’t how to make it; it’s when you should use it, and don’t use it if you shouldn’t. Okay, thank you very much; have a good day!