"I can tell that he's not English, but I wouldn't had been able to tell that he's french if you didn't tell me first"
it was told me that this kind of usage is wrong, and that I should have used "I wouldn't have been able to tell that"
When should I use "had been" and when "have been"?
Answer
"have been" is the past perfect tense. It refers to an event in the past, from the perspective of the present. For instance, "[At some point before NOW] I have been told he's French".
"had been" is the pluperfect tense. You'd use it when talking about an event in the past that was before some other point in the past, say "Before I met him, I had been told he's French".
However, in your case it's actually a different beast, the conditional perfect tense. "would have been" is used whenever there's a condition that existed in the past, whether or not you'd ordinarily use "have been" or "had been".
Basically, the fact you're using a condition overrides the fact that you'd ordinarily use the pluperfect.
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