LEARN ENGLISH with Dan - Past perfect simple and continuous

Sep 26 2022 3 mins

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Improve your English today at ANGLOPOD.COM. Hi everyone, I’m Dan and today we’re going to look at the past perfect simple and continuous.

We looked at the past perfect simple in the previous lesson compared with the past simple. But we can also use the past perfect in the continuous form as well. We saw that the past perfect is used to show that an event in the past happened before another event in the past. If we don’t use the past perfect to show that some past events happen at different times, it might be confusing.

Here’s an example of a past simple statement. “I WAS tired”. OK, why was I tired? What happened before this past situation to make me feel tired? We could say: “I WAS tired because I HAD BEEN RUNNING”. So that’s past simple, WAS, and past perfect continuous, HAD BEEN RUNNING. The continuous form here is very useful for describing an action that maybe is not complete.

Let’s add some more information to this situation. “I WAS tired because I HAD BEEN RUNNING. In fact, I HAD RUN ten kilometres”. HAD RUN is past perfect simple and this expresses completion. Those ten kilometres are finished, completed.

So we make the past perfect continuous with the auxiliary verb HAVE in the past, so HAD, then BEEN, and the present participle of the main verb, in this example RUN, so RUNNING. HAD BEEN RUNNING.

“I WAS tired because I HAD BEEN RUNNING. In fact, I HAD RUN ten kilometres”.