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Updated on
18 Jan 2021
- English (US) Near fluent
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English (US)
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Japanese
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English (UK)
Question about English (US)
I get confused between the simple past tense and the past perfect tense when everything happened in the past.
I wonder why it’s necessary to use past perfect tense in here.
I get confused between the simple past tense and the past perfect tense when everything happened in the past.
I wonder why it’s necessary to use past perfect tense in here.
I wonder why it’s necessary to use past perfect tense in here.
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18 Jan 2021
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- English (US)
You can think of the past perfect as the "past of the past." It refers to an action that occurred before another past action. It's often the case that the first past action is not stated, but implied by the context. The first past action can also just be a past time.
In your example, the past event is whatever is happening "now." In this context, we know that "now" is not actually the present time (= the moment the narrator is speaking), but rather some point in the past, after the flood waters had receded. So we can say that the heavens closed and the rain stopped *before* the time that the narrator is referring to ("now"), but we also know that "now" must also be in the past.
The same applies to line 3. The past time being referenced is 150 days after the rain stopped. The water went down before that time, but that time is also before the present.
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- English (US)
Honestly, simple past tense would work here and convey the same meaning to me. I would not use past perfect here, if it were me writing, but either works. I don’t really know why either sounds normal in this context. I think because “now” in this case is a way of saying “by this time.” Past perfect sounds better with “by [time period]” to me. In verse 3, I think simple past is better
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- English (US)
You can think of the past perfect as the "past of the past." It refers to an action that occurred before another past action. It's often the case that the first past action is not stated, but implied by the context. The first past action can also just be a past time.
In your example, the past event is whatever is happening "now." In this context, we know that "now" is not actually the present time (= the moment the narrator is speaking), but rather some point in the past, after the flood waters had receded. So we can say that the heavens closed and the rain stopped *before* the time that the narrator is referring to ("now"), but we also know that "now" must also be in the past.
The same applies to line 3. The past time being referenced is 150 days after the rain stopped. The water went down before that time, but that time is also before the present.
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- English (US) Near fluent
- English (US) Near fluent
@simpsonsteven16 Thanks for shedding light on the concept, which I have never seen on English textbooks :) By the way, I wonder if that applies to the present perfect tense as well.
- English (US)
The present perfect is most used for actions that happened in the past, but you want to focus on the state (in the present) that results from it. In other words, you're more interested in the result of the action than the action itself.
For example, when you say "I have arrived," you're communicating two things:
1) you arrived at some point in the past
2) the result of that action (= being in the place you arrived at) still applies in the present. This means you can't say "I have arrived" if you arrived in a place and then left.
The past and future perfect work the same way, except that the result has to still be true at some later point in the past for the past perfect or the future for the future perfect. So in your original example, saying that the water had gone down after 150 days, that means that the waters went down some time before that and were still down 150 days later.
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