Past perfect examples

The past perfect shows that an event in the past happened before another event in the past.

Example sentences

(1) Lisa couldn’t pay. She had forgotten her purse.
(2) When Peter arrived, Sue had already left the bar.

▶ The past perfect is used to say that one past action followed another. The action in the past perfect happened earlier.

Example sentences

(3) She had known him for years when he told her that he was gay.
(4) When I visited John in the hospital, he had been there for three months.

▶ We can also use the past perfect to speak about a state (Zustand) that began before a point of time in the past and lasted up to that point of time.

Comparison: past tense ⟷ past perfect

Example sentence

(5) When Roy’s girlfriend arrived he had cooked the dinner.

▶ The dinner is ready when she arrives.

An event in the past perfect happened earlier than the events in the past tense.

Example sentence

(6) When Roy’s girlfriend arrived he cooked the dinner.

▶ He starts cooking the dinner after she arrives.

Several (mehrere) events in the past tense are seen as a sequence of events (Abfolge von Ereignissen) in the past (and happened in the order in which they are named in the text). This is especially common in stories etc.

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