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Referring to Multiple Events in the Past
Posted: May 13th, 2025, 9:28 am
by DanielBJacobsen
I'm having trouble with when to use the past perfect in a sequence of events. I understand that it is used for an event that happened before another past event, but I'm not sure how to apply it when there are multiple events. For example, in the sentence, "I had thought that I had shot a goose, but it turned out to be a duck," I feel like the past perfect sounds awkward. I think a more natural expression would be, "I thought I had shot a goose, but it turned out to be a duck." Is this a dialect issue?
Re: Referring to Multiple Events in the Past
Posted: May 13th, 2025, 9:55 am
by Josef Essberger
DanielBJacobsen wrote: ↑May 13th, 2025, 9:28 am
I'm having trouble with when to use the past perfect in a sequence of events. I understand that it is used for an event that happened before another past event, but I'm not sure how to apply it when there are multiple events. For example, in the sentence, "I had thought that I had shot a goose, but it turned out to be a duck," I feel like the past perfect sounds awkward. I think a more natural expression would be, "I thought I had shot a goose, but it turned out to be a duck." Is this a dialect issue?
"I thought I had shot a goose, but it turned out to be a duck" is perfectly natural and correct.