Ling Chin Chuan Low Ying Yee Amir Akmal Lee Seo Lin Mohd Idris

The past perfect tense is often used in English when we are relating two events which happened in the past. It helps to show which event happened first

 made

with the auxiliary verb had + past participle (which is different for regular and irregular verbs: -ed ending for regular verbs, e.g. worked, travelled, tried, different forms for irregular verbs, e.g. written, made, sung).

Positive Subject + had + past participle You/ He/ She/ They had finished before I arrived. Negative Subject + had + not (hadn't) + past participle I/ You/ She/ We/ They hadn't eaten before he finished the job.

The rules, using the regular verb arrive and the irregular verb eat
Subjek Have Past Pasticiple Contraction

I You He She It
We They

had had had had had

had had

arrived. eaten. arrived. eaten. arrived. eaten. arrived. eaten. arrived. eaten.
arrived. eaten. arrived. eaten.

Id arrived. Id eaten. Youd arrived. Youd eaten. Hed arrived. Hed eaten. Shed arrived. Shed eaten. Itd arrived. Itd eaten.
Wed arrived. Wed eaten. Theyd arrived. Theyd eaten.

The past perfect is used to show you which of two events happened first. Imagine that two things happened in the past:

I went to see the movie.

We discussed the movie in class.
Here, we don't know which order the events happened in. That may be important -- perhaps I went to see the movie after the discussion, or maybe I saw the movie before the discussion. There are many ways to make this sequence clear, and the past perfect is one of them.

I went to see the movie. We had discussed it in class.

Here, we know that the discussion took place first-- even though the sentence describing it comes afterwards. We discussed the movie, and then I went to see it.
This can be very useful when you are telling a story or relating a sequence of events. At any point in your story, you can jump back to a previous event, and your reader will not be confused, because the past perfect will make it clear that the event happened previously.

Example: 1.The door bell rang at last. I had been in the room since breakfast. 2. When I arrived there Sarah had already left. 3. I was so hungry! I had not eaten anything since the morning. Explain: 1. The bell rang at noon. I came in the morning before that. 2.I arrived after lunch. Sarah went home before lunch. 3.It was late at night.

Past prefect also used to refer to activities that were completed before a point of time.

Example:

1. In 2005 I had lived in the same place for ten years. 2. Had you ever travelled by plane before your holiday in Spain?