How To Use Past Perfect Tenses SIMPLE or CONTINUOUS
Welcome back to the mmmEnglish Youtube Channel,
I’m your coach, Emma and today we’re going to focus on the
language that you need to tell stories in English
which is a fundamental communication skill, isn’t it?
When we tell stories, whether they’re based on real experiences or
they’re made up stories to entertain others,
we’re usually talking about something that happened in the past,
a past event.
So knowing how to accurately use the past tenses is really useful
but it’s also going to help you to tell stories in an interesting
and engaging way.
You might have seen narrative tenses in English textbooks.
So this refers to verb tenses that are used to talk about the past
and help you to tell a story.
So in this lesson today we are going to take a close look at the
past perfect continuous and of course, I’m going to share
the similarities and differences between this tense
and the past perfect because they’re kind of similar.
Even though this is a grammar lesson,
we’re going to do some pronunciation practice and have some fun
along the way and make sure you stick with me to the end,
I’ve got a mini quiz to help you practise everything you learn
in this lesson. Let’s get to it!
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Now narrative tenses, like I said earlier is just another way
to talk about the past tenses and so they include
the past simple, the past continuous, the past perfect
and the past perfect continuous.
And a narrative is a spoken or a written account
of connected events. A story.
And these tenses help us to give accurate information about
how and when events happened in the past
so the past perfect continuous gives us very specific
information about the state of the action
and when I say state, I’m talking about whether or not that action
or that event has started,
if it was in progress or it was complete
at a particular moment in the past.
So it helps us to order our stories
but it’ll be much easier if I show you an example
so that you can see what I’m talking about.
Last week, I went for a bike ride.
I saw my friend Paul.
So these two sentences are both written in the past simple
aren’t they? They’re completed actions. They’re finished.
When we put them on a timeline we can see that
they both took place at some point in the past but
we don’t know when or which one happened first, do we?
So by using a combination of narrative tenses
we can be more precise about how and when these actions
took place so if we use the past perfect continuous,
we’re going to bring our story to life.
I had been riding my bike when I saw my friend Paul.
So when I put one of these actions into the
past perfect continuous,
it becomes really clear that the bike riding started
before I met Paul and at the moment in time when I met Paul
the bike riding was incomplete.
I hadn’t finished riding my bike when I saw Paul.
So the past perfect continuous describes an event
an event that started before a particular moment in time
and it was still in progress at that time in the past.
Let’s look at another example.
She had been working in the garden
when it started to rain.
So at that moment,
at the moment it started to rain
what was the state of the action working?
Had she finished working in the garden?
No, when the rain started, the gardening or working in the garden
was incomplete. There was still more work
to be done. It wasn’t finished.
Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably already
noticed what goes into a past perfect continuous
sentence. They use the auxiliary verbs had and been
along with the main verb which is in -ing form.
Let’s just go back to those original examples.
I had been riding my bike when I saw my friend Paul.
She had been working in the garden
when it started to rain.
Now you can create negative sentences by putting not
between had and being.
Had not been.
I had not been riding my bike.
She hadn’t been working in the garden.
So before we go any further why don’t you take a moment
just to write a few sentences
with this tense just to practise the structure,
add them down into the comments below.
I’ll be down there to review them and give a little bit of help
if you need it.
And before we go any further in this lesson, I want to take a
few moments to focus on your pronunciation to make sure that
when you are using this tense you’re sounding natural and relaxed
just like me or any other native English speaker
and using contractions with the past perfect continuous is
definitely going to help.
Now if you’ve watched my lesson about auxiliary verbs
which is up here if you need it,
you’ll know that auxiliary verbs are usually
unstressed and it changes the way that they are spoken.
They are usually connected to the subject in spoken English
and that makes a contraction.
In a past perfect continuous sentence
there are two auxiliary verbs had and being
but had is the one that is contracted to the subject
so it’s very natural to say I’d instead of I had,
you’d instead of you had,
she’d, he’d, we’d
they’d
and the trickiest one, it’d.
Try it.
It’d been raining all day.
Now the verb been is also an auxillary verb
and although it doesn’t get contracted in the same way that
had does, it’s also unstressed in spoken English
so you won’t really hear people saying
been, they had been here.
What you’ll actually hear is been.
Been with a short vowel sound.
I’d been doing the shopping.
You’d been listening to music.
He’d been cooking.
It’d been raining.
You get the idea.
Usually at this point I’d continue on and show you how all
of these contractions sound in the negative form as well
but I’ve got something that might come as a bit of a surprise.
The past perfect continuous is actually not very common
in spoken English.
It just sounds quite formal in spoken language,
maybe it’s all of those auxiliary verbs
so you’ll often hear people using the past continuous
just to sound a little bit more natural.
Now if you really want to get some pronunciation practice
with past perfect contractions, you can check out this lesson
up here where I go into it in a lot more detail.
Okay so let’s talk about some of the most common mistakes
that my students are making with this tense
and actually, there are two of them the first one is using verbs that
can’t be used in the continuous tense.
Yeah not all verbs can be used in the continuous tense
like this sentence here, something’s not quite right about it.
The verb see just like other verbs of the senses
like taste and smell, these are stative verbs
and stative verbs describe a state of being rather than an action
and usually they can’t be used in the continuous tense.
This sentence is going to sound so much better if we use an action
verb instead.
I’d been watching the waves when I bumped into Paul.
Or if you really want to use the verb see then just switch the tense.
I saw the waves crashing into the shore
and later I bumped into Paul.
The second mistake that I see my students making all of the time
is this one.
She has been working in the garden
when it started to rain.
Can you see what’s wrong with this one?
This is the present perfect continuous, the past perfect uses had.
No matter what the subject is, we use had in the past perfect.
You’re used to conjugating verbs for the third person singular
subjects in English, she, he and it
but not with the past perfect.
You only use had no matter what the subject.
You’re probably feeling pretty confident with this tense by now
but you might be wondering
well how is this tense different from the past perfect simple?
Well there are three ways to compare these two tenses
and I’m going to go through it right now. Are you ready?
The first difference to remember is that the past perfect
shows a completed action whereas the past perfect continuous
shows an incomplete action.
We had just been for a bike ride when we bumped into Paul.
Or we could also say:
We had been riding our bikes when we bumped into Paul.
So in the first example
we’re using the past perfect simple
to explain that the bike ride was complete when we met Paul.
We’re not riding anymore the ride is over
but in the second example,
the past perfect continuous
tells us that the bike ride is still in progress.
It’s an incomplete action.
Is that clear? Good.
However both of these tenses can actually express
a completed action, especially when we’re using them
with the adverbs for and since which is really common
in perfect tenses, isn’t it? Let’s have a look at an example.
I had been cleaning for hours to prepare for the party.
Or we could say I had cleaned for hours to prepare for the party.
The meaning is almost the same in both sentences
but the emphasis shifts just ever so slightly
because the past perfect continuous helps us to emphasise
the duration or the length of the action,
you know, I spent a long time cleaning and now finally
the house is clean.
The past perfect sentence emphasises that the action is complete
so I’ve finished cleaning and as a result
the house is ready for the party.
Now in reality, in many situations, you can use either the past
perfect or the past perfect continuous
and it’s just that subtle difference in meaning that makes
your sentences a little more powerful.
Now the third difference that you need to be aware of
is about how that action is viewed.
Is it a temporary action or is it a permanent one?
He had lived in London for five years.
Now in that sentence we view the action as being permanent
using the past perfect but compare that to:
He had been living in London for five years.
Now in that sentence we view the action as being temporary.
It’s so subtle. It’s not the meaning of the sentence that changes.
Both of those sentences are correct, there’s just a teeny tiny shift
in the way that we view the action, whether it’s temporary
or it’s permanent. Let me give you another example.
My brother had been working in a restaurant for two years
when he decided to study medicine.
So I’m using the past perfect continuous here because
I think of that job as being temporary.
Now, on the other hand, my brother would say:
I had worked in the restaurant industry for two years
before I started studying medicine.
So he’s using the past perfect because he viewed that action
that work as being permanent. He thought that that career
would be a permanent one in the restaurant industry.
So you can see that there isn’t always a right or a wrong answer,
sometimes it just comes down to emphasis or perception
and the way that you choose to communicate your story.
The way that you choose to express something might actually be
different to the way that someone else does
and that’s okay.
All right I think it’s time for a quiz now. We’ve gone through
how to accurately use the past perfect continuous tense.
Now let’s practise actually using it together.
I’m going to give you two events or two actions and both of these
things have taken place in the past so all you need to do is
join them together into one sentence and make sure you use
the past perfect continuous.
So for example, the first event is we played football.
This is the thing that was happening first but then
something else happened. It started to rain.
So your answer could be:
We had been playing football when it started to rain.
Okay so now it’s your turn to write these sentences.
I want you to write them down in the comments below
so I can come down and check them for you,
give you some feedback if you need them.
I’m not going to go through the answers in this video.
So the first event: We waited for the bus for an hour.
And the second event: The bus finally arrived.
Hit pause if you need to, write your sentence down below.
Okay try this one.
He worked at the supermarket for a long time.
One day he became the manager.
They spent the whole afternoon cooking
but the dinner guests cancelled.
So how did you do? I hope that this lesson has helped to make
the past perfect continuous a little clearer
and hopefully, you feel a bit more comfortable using it now.
Another really great way for you to practise and become
more familiar with this tense is through your writing.
Even if it’s as simple and mundane as writing about what you did
during the day, it’s an awesome opportunity to practise
using narrative tenses to help you accurately tell the story
of your day in order so that it’s clear
when and how these events happened in relation to each other.
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