When you tell stories, do you always tell them in chronological order?
Usually, but not always.
Sometimes we mention something that happened earlier, like a flashback.
If it happened earlier, why would you just say it now?
Maybe it’s more important now than when it happened.
So, you’re saying the order we tell events might depend on importance or on relevance,
instead of when they actually happened?
Sometimes.
Cool.
That’s what we’re talking about in this video.
Great.
Narratives generally take place in the past,
but flashbacks happen even further in the past.
Yeah.
In fact, even those moments in our narrative past would regard flashbacks as their past.
So what would we call that?
The past of the past?
Uh … past-past?
Double past?
Yeah, I like to think of it as ‘double past’ or ‘super past’.
The real name for it is ‘Past Perfect’.
Oh, is it like ‘present perfect’?
Yeah, it is.
Why do we use present perfect again?
For verbs that started before now, but they’re still relevant in the present.
Exactly.
In the same way, past perfect is for verbs that started before the narrative past,
but they’re still relevant for that narrative past.
What?
‘Before the past’ doesn’t sound right to me.
Isn’t the past everything before the present?
Remember that we’re not talking about all of the past,
just a specific past time period.
For example, “The ground was wet Thursday morning because it had rained the night before.”
‘Thursday morning’ is our narrative past, and ‘the night before’ is even earlier than that
So ‘it had rained’ is super past, or past perfect.
Right!
I like to draw it out on timelines like this one.
Sometimes that's helpful for visual learners.
Yeah, I’m not one of those.
Can we try something different?
Sure.
Let’s work with numbers instead.
I’m not a math person, either.
You don’t need to be.
As long as you can count to ten, you’ll be fine.
Oh, okay.
Let’s take a look at these sentences.
“Rachel took a cab home.
When she got to the door, she couldn’t get inside
because she had left her keys at the party.”
There are four things that Rachel did (or didn’t do).
What’s the first one you see?
She took a cab.
Right.
Let’s put that at the top for now.
What’s next?
She got to the door.
Was that before or after “took a cab”?
After.
Okay, what’s the next one?
She couldn’t get inside.
When did that happen?
It was at the same time as “got to the door”.
Okay, we’ll put those together.
Finally, she left her keys.
Where does that fit into our sequence?
Well, if she left them at the party, then that’s before she got in the cab.
Alright.
Now let’s number these.
1, 2, 3, and 3.
You mean ‘4’?
Oh, nevermind; the last two happened at the same time.
Right.
Let’s go back to those sentences.
When we read these numbers in sequence, it’s 2, 3, 3, 1.
What’s wrong with that?
They’re out of order.
Exactly!
We normally move forward in a narrative, or at least stay at the same time.
But here, when we get to “left her keys”, we move backward instead.
Into the past.
But we were already in the past.
It’s the past-of-the-past!
This is where we use Past Perfect; when we stop progressing chronologically.
Got it!
Take a look at the form;
it’s not only ‘left’.
It’s ‘had left’.
Yeah.
And ‘left’ isn’t just the past of ‘leave’.
Remember that there’s a third verb form called ‘Past Participle’.
Yeah, I remember those.
For this verb, ‘left’ works for both the past and past participle forms.
With many other verbs, it’s different.
But for most verbs, we just end with -ed, right?
Right.
It’s just like with the Present Perfect tense.
For that, we use ‘have’ or ‘has’ plus Verb 3.
What’s the past of ‘have’/’has’?
‘had’
That’s all that needs to change to make the form Past Perfect.
Cool!
So, we’ll use this method of numbering the verbs in a sequence,
and finding what’s out of order.
To help us, let’s review some connecting words.
Like what?
Like conjunctions and prepositions.
Adverbs can also help.
What words might you use when placing things in order?
‘then’, ‘next’, or ‘after that’
Yeah, great.
We can also use logic connectors like ‘therefore’ and ‘so’.
Yeah.
All of these move us forward in time.
What about when things happen at the same time?
‘and’/‘or’/‘but’, ‘when’, and ‘while’
Cool.
Can you think of any that refer to a previous time?
‘before’, ‘already’, ‘because’, and ‘since’.
Yeah. ‘by the time’ is another common one.
Also, many of the time expressions we use for Present Perfect can also be used for Past Perfect.
Like ‘just’, or ‘ever’ and ‘never’.
Right.
As we go through some examples,
take notice of any of these expressions that you see,
as well as references to time periods.
They’ll give you clues as to whether we need to use Past Perfect.
Got it.
Let’s try some examples now.
We’ll figure out how the order of the verbs in the sentences differs from their chronological order.
The places where they differ are when we need to use Past Perfect instead of simple Past.
Start with this one.
Okay.
Do you recognize any conjunctions?
Yeah, ‘because’ and ‘so’.
Which direction do they go?
‘Because’ points backward, but ‘so’ points forward.
Good.
So what verbs do we have?
‘not recognize’, ‘not see’, and ‘walk’
Do we know the order?
The word ‘because’ tells us that ‘not see’ probably happens before ‘not recognize’.
Also, it’s been ten years.
Right.
But ‘so’ tells us that ‘walk’ happens last.
Yep.
The order of the verbs is 2, 1, 3.
Great.
Let’s put them in the correct forms.
To stay in the simple past form,
each number should be the same or higher than the number before it.
If it’s lower, we need to use Past Perfect.
Got it.
We start with past.
“I didn’t recognize Harvey.”
Good.
Since that’s number 2, the next verb should be 2 or higher to stay past simple.
But it’s not.
It’s less than two.
Okay, so that one’s past perfect.
“I hadn’t seen him.”
Great.
Last one.
It’s higher than 2, so it’s just Past again.
“I walked right by him.”
Well done!
“I didn’t recognize Harvey because I hadn’t seen him in ten years,
so I walked right by him!”
Let’s try another one.
Okay, let’s see. ...
There’s the expression ‘never before’,
which means that ‘perform’ happens before be.
Actually, it probably happens before everything else.
That’s number one, then.
‘be’ happens before ‘begin’.
But we know from ‘by the time’ that ‘practice’ also happens before ‘begin’.
Very good.
‘know’ comes after ‘practice’.
I think ‘know’ happens around the same time as ‘begin’.
Alright, so our sequence is 2, 1, 4, 3, 4.
2 is okay, but we move back to 1.
Then up to 4, back to 3, and forward again to 4.
That’s right!
‘perform’ is out of order, and so is ‘practice’.
Both of those should be past perfect.
Everything else happens in order, so they should just be past simple.
Well done.
What’s the whole thing?
“I was nervous about the piano recital; I had never performed in front of an audience before.
But by the time the recital began, I had practiced so much that I knew I was ready.”
Excellent!
Let’s try one final example.
This one will be a little different.
How so?
We’ll start with all the clauses in chronological order.
But then we’ll put things in a different order that’s either more logical or it just sounds better.
So what do you think?
Hm.
I think the cookie statements should be next to each other.
But keeping the 3’s together makes sense to me,
so “Dennis ate all of the cookies” should come after “The cookies were gone.”
Yeah, that’s one way to do it.
How would you connect the cookie clauses?
“The cookies were gone because Dennis already ate all of them.”
That sounds great!
What about the two number 3’s?
“When you arrived,” comma.
Or “by the time you arrived”.
Sure, both of those work.
And we could put ‘so’ after number 1.
Let’s check the order of the verbs.
1-3-3 is okay because it moves forward or stays still,
but then it moves backward to 2.
So what do we do?
Change ‘ate’ to ‘had eaten’.
Alright. What’s the whole thing?
“Dennis didn’t know that you were visiting this weekend'
so when you arrived, the cookies were gone because Dennis had already eaten all of them.”
Fantastic job!
I should point out that there are multiple correct ways to solve this.
Different people might arrange and connect the clauses differently
according to what makes sense to them, or what feels right.
Often, it’s not in chronological order.
The Past Perfect tense give us the freedom to do things a little differently.