{"id":2003,"date":"2017-03-19T16:27:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T16:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/?p=2003"},"modified":"2017-03-19T16:27:38","modified_gmt":"2017-03-19T16:27:38","slug":"the-past-perfect-tense-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/the-past-perfect-tense-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"The past perfect tense overview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The past perfect tense<\/strong> is used to talk about the earlier of two past events.<\/p>\n<p>Form: Subject + had + past participle form of the verb<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I<strong> had finished dinner<\/strong> before dad came home.<\/li>\n<li>The patient <strong>had died<\/strong> before the doctor came.<\/li>\n<li>She <strong>had left<\/strong> before I reached home.<\/li>\n<li>The boy <strong>had drowned<\/strong> before people came to rescue him.<\/li>\n<li>It <strong>had stopped<\/strong> raining before we went out.<\/li>\n<li>She <strong>had finished<\/strong> her studies before she got married.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Note that the past perfect tense is not used to simply state that something happened some time ago. That idea is expressed with the simple past tense.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ravi <strong>called<\/strong> ten minutes ago. (NOT Ravi had called ten minutes ago.)<\/li>\n<li>Ravi had called before he left for airport. (Here we are talking about two past events and hence we use the past perfect for the earlier of the \u00a0two actions.)<\/li>\n<li>His father died last year. (NOT His father had died last year.)<\/li>\n<li>His parents<strong> had died<\/strong> before he turned 18.<\/li>\n<li>My mother made a cake yesterday. (NOT My mother had made a cake yesterday.)<\/li>\n<li>My mother<strong> had made<\/strong> the cake before I returned home from school.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sometimes we use the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.perfectyourenglish.com\/grammar\/conjunctions.htm\">conjunctions before and after <\/a>to show which action took place first. The use of the past perfect tense is optional in this case.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I <strong>had finished<\/strong> my homework before dad came home. OR I finished my homework before dad came home.<\/li>\n<li>I <strong>had learnt<\/strong> my lessons before I went out to play. OR I learnt my lessons before I went out to play.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The past perfect tense is used to talk about the earlier of two past events. Form: Subject + had + past participle form of the verb I had finished dinner before dad came home.&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[251],"tags":[421],"class_list":["post-2003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grammar","tag-past-perfect-tense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2004,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003\/revisions\/2004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/perfectyourenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}