I´ve got the following problem. According to my teacher I can not use past perfect in this sentence:
Before 2000 I had visited Poland, Ukraine, France, The Netherlands.
To my ears it sounds ok and I can not imagine using past simple as the past perfect summarize all the places I had visited before the year 2000.
What´s your opinion on this? Which tense would you use?
Thank you very much!
Answer
The past perfect describes something that happened further in the past. It must have some (implied or explicit) relation to some other past event. "Before 2000" establishes the timeline, but it does not refer to a particular past event. You could instead say "Before new millennium started, I had already visited Poland, Ukraine, France, and The Netherlands." I would say that even this construction is still a little awkward sounding, though. I think "Before 2000, I visited Poland, Ukraine, France, and The Netherlands." is the clearest way of expressing the idea.
No comments:
Post a Comment