Question

How do you determine when to use simple past and past perfect tense?

Answer 1

Hint: If we provide past events in the order in which they happened, we use Simple Past. When we look back in time to say what happened before, though, we use Past Perfect.

Complete answer:
The simple past denotes a verb tense used to describe events that occurred or existed in the past.
Past perfect is a verb tense that describes behaviour that occurred before a certain point in the past.
Example: We were shocked to find that someone had graffitied "Tiana was here" on our frontal door. We were comforted that Tiana had not used permanent paint.

The past perfect tense describes events that occurred before another one.

How can one tell the difference between past perfect and past simple? When you're talking about something that happened in the past and want to refer to something that happened much ago, you should use the past perfect to express the timeline of events. It's much more precise and precise. Let us look into the differences in the two sentences given below:
Example: We were relieved that Tiana used washable paint. We were relieved that Tiana did not use permanent paint.

It's a small difference, but the first sentence doesn't tie Tiana's act of using non-permanent paint to any distinct moment in time. The students might understand it as "We were relieved that Tiana was in the habit of using non-permanent paint." In the next sentence, the past perfect clarifies that we are talking about a particular instance of using non-permanent paint.

Another situation to use the past perfect is when you are showing a condition and a result:
Example: If I had woken up earlier this morning, I would have caught Tiana guilty.
The past perfect is used in the sentence that explains the condition (the if-clause).

The most common explanation for writing a verb in the past perfect tense is to prove that it occurred before other actions represented by verbs in the simple past tense in the same sentence. It's rare to write a paragraph in which every verb is in the past perfect tense.

Note: Both past perfect and simple past, also known as the past perfect simple, convey done acts in the past. We use the basic past to describe events that occurred in the past, usually in chronological order. The past perfect expresses incidents and acts that took place before another action in the past (usually expressed in the simple past). With spoken English, the simple past is sometimes used rather than the past perfect.