We will learn all the different ways we can use the past perfect tense! It’s easier than you think!
Past Perfect is seen as one of the most difficult tenses however it is actually quite simple.
Use past perfect we need to understand two things the first thing we need to understand is that past simple Works chronologically this means that events happen in order of time always
I woke up and had a shower. I drank a coffee and left for work.
If we say: I drank a coffee, woke up. I left for work and had a shower,
the sentence is meaningless.
Past simple always goes in one direction: forwards in time.
Past perfect is the reverse: it goes backwards in time.
I arrived at work late as I had missed my train. This was because my daughter had had difficulty getting ready in the morning.
Note: ‘had had’ is used here because ‘have difficulty’ in past perfect is ‘had had difficulty’.
You can see that we start with past simple. We can’t start with past perfect. We need a verb in past simple to be our ⚓︎ anchor.
I arrived at work late ⚓︎ as I had missed my train. This was because my daughter had had difficulty getting ready in the morning.
We can use this in two ways:
1) To explain events in reverse:
In some situations, it is more useful to explain what happened in reverse time.
“ I could finish the reports on time once the other team had given me the information I needed. this took them a while because the database had been under maintenance.”
“ The dinner went really well because I’d prepared all the ingredients the night before. I was lucky because I had found everything I needed in the local supermarket.”
“ When I arrived at their office I found I couldn’t connect to their projector. They’d changed the system and we hadn’t been told.
2) To add details of events that happened before our story starts.
We don’t always want to speak in time-order from past to present. Sometimes it’s more interesting to add past events later.
“She took me to a nice restaurant. It felt really comfortable. I realized that this was the restaurant I had been to with my family after I’d graduated university.
“I was worried about being transferred overseas but relieved when I realized I’d worked with most of the people before.”
And sometimes, we might add an important detail later.
“It took me a while to find the office. They’d moved location last year.”
“This new software is really good. We can input the information quickly. The previous software had required us to write our full name and employee number every time we used it.
Past perfect gives us much more flexibility with how we can explain events in the past.
