Alright, question number five. What is the difference between simple past and past perfect?
For example, “did you see the class, or have you seen the class?” So, I’m going to switch my
screen here. Alright, so hopefully you guys can see that now. So here we have a little screen,
a little thing explaining the difference. So, simple past is used to talk about completed and
finished past events or actions. For example, “I watched a film last night.” This means it
happened in the past and it is done. I’m not watching a movie now, it happened last night.
“I didn't go to school on Monday.” So, this is the negative form. I did not do that
at that time. Right, it didn't happen. In the question form, “did you go surfing last week?” So,
this is asking about a completed or finished past event. And there, in those we saw the structure. A
normal sentence is subject + past simple verb and completing the sentence. So, “I went to school.”
The negative form subject + didn't + base form and the rest of the sentence. “I didn't go to school.”
And the question form, did + subject + base form, and the rest of the question. “Did you go
to school?” And again, these are all used to talk about completed past events, past things. So, the
past simple is verb plus “ed,” but don't forget about those irregular verbs like “went” Right,
we'd say, “today I go, yesterday I went.” No “ed” right, don't forget about those irregular verbs.
Now let's look at past perfect. Past perfect is used to express the idea that something
happened before another action in the past. “I had seen a film. I hadn't gone to school.”
Had you gone, should say gone, surfing? So, there we saw our structure for the past perfect.
Subject + had + participle. Subject + hadn't + participle, and had + subject + participle.
Remember, our participles are those words like, been, seen, gone, and so on.
So, the past simple, the past participles, are verb plus “ed.” Walked, “I had walked.” Unless
we have an irregular verb like “be” changes to “been.” Okay, so again this is about a timeline.
We have our past perfect, then the past simple up to now. So, these are really useful for talking
about something that happened before. So, let's take a look our past perfect. “Paul had gone,”
plus our past simple “Sarah arrived.” So our sentence is, “when Sarah arrived Paul had left.”
So, which action do you think happened first? “When Sarah arrived Paul had left.” Well, here
Paul left first, Sarah arrived after Paul left. So, we used the past perfect to talk
about something that happened before another event in the past. “When Sarah arrived, Paul had left.”
He was already gone. Okay, let's take a look at a few more examples to see this, that we
use that past perfect to talk about events that happened before. So, we'll just look at a few.
So here, “when we arrived to the theater, they had sold all the tickets.” So again,
what happened first? Did they sell all the tickets first? Or did we arrive to the theater first?
They sold all the tickets first. That past perfect is something that happened before. Before we
got to the theater, all the tickets had sold. Let's go to number three. “I had met him before
he was famous.” Okay, so here what happened first? Was he famous first? Or did I meet him first?
Here, I met him first. Our simple past is what happened first before he was famous right. I had
met him before he was famous. So, he became famous after I met him. Okay guys and I’ll leave these
here for a second. There we see the difference, the key difference between simple past and past
perfect past perfect is used to talk about things that happen before something else very often.