The use of past perfect continuous tense

EFL/ESL Grammar: English tenses

The use of past perfect continuous tense in English

The past perfect continuous is used to talk about a continuous action or an event that happened in the past before another action. Usually, we have two actions. The first one is put in the past perfect continuous tense and the second is put in the simple past. It is not important which one happened first. The tense can be used to indicate which one happened before the other.

The grammatical structure of the past perfect

Subject + had + been + verb (ing)

Example:

I had been studying grammar when she came from school.

The use of past perfect

Just like what is mentioned above, we use the past perfect to show that an action happened before another one in the past.

The past perfect continuous is used with the following adverbs:

When – before – by the time –– after – because

Note:

You can easily remember the use of these adverbs. Because and after are always used to introduce the past perfect continuous. So, a sentence that includes one of these two adverbs will have the first action in the past perfect continuous, and the second in the simple past. Before and by the time are used to introduce the simple past. So, a sentence that includes one of these adverbs will have the immediate sentence in the simple past and the other one in the past perfect.