Tutorial Transcript

Hi everyone and welcome back to my channel! In this video we'll talk about the remote past tense (past perfect) and when it is used. Let me know soon in the comments whether you find the past perfect difficult or easy. So, the past perfect. many of you has asked me when do I need to use the past perfect? and what is it different from the near past (present perfect)? The past perfect is used for speaking about events or actions that occurred in the past, in fact in a remote past. So we are talking about, for example, something that had happened 2 years ago, one year ago. The present perfect, on the hand, is used to talk about actions or events that were happening in a more recent past, for example, one month ago or even this morning. The difference use of those 2 tenses with verbs also comes from a different psychological distance that the speaker attributes to the event. Generally speaking, the past perfect is used little in the spoken language. It is widely used in the central-south of Italy, more in the south of Italy, where they actually use in past perfect even for speaking of events that happened yesterday. Let's say that in the north of Italy and also in the center, for example even in Rome, they don't use the past perfect to speak about events that happened yesterday, but the present perfect. The same for the north of Italy. It's a bit heavy to use the past perfect when speaking about yesterday or this morning, because those are events that just happened. So, in those cases, it's not the past perfect, but the present perfect, a more recent past tense. The past perfect, however, is very much in use in literature. If you a random novel, a random book, the tense used is going to be the past perfect. So it is important to be familiar with it because it will allow you to read and understand novels, and let's say any literature work. And also, when you yourself write a story, you'd need to use the past perfect. It would be the most accurate choice to use. So, this is all for today. I hope that this information will be of use to you. We'll be seeing on the next video! Bye!