One interesting feature of English is the way that we talk about the past. In English, we have a past, present and future. But our past also has its OWN past, present and future! You can imagine it like this:

When English speakers talk about a past time, we switch our perspective back to the past. We don't talk about whether something happened before or after now; we talk about whether it was before or after that point in the past. English has special ways of talking about things that happened before, during, and after a past event:

Past past (Things that happened before the past)

When English speakers talk about something that happened before a past event, they use "had done", "had ___ed", "had ___en", and so on. For example:

Last year, I was talking to my friend Vernon about the band Arcade Fire. I had seen them in concert the previous summer.

If you show these events on a timeline, it looks like this:

The time when the speaker was talking to her friend is the past "perspective" point, or the past's version of "now". Seeing the band in concert happened before that, so the speaker says "I had seen them."

When you're talking about something that started before the past perspective point, but then continued until that time, you use "had been __ing". For example, when you're telling a story about something that happened last week, you can say:

I'd been waiting for my sister for 30 minutes.

Past present (Things that were happening at a point of time in the past)

Whenever you use "was" or "were", you're speaking from the past perspective. You pick a certain moment or time, and tell what was happening at the same time. Simple examples include:

It was raining.

I was sleeping.

Here's how to think about events happening during the past:

You can also give descriptions of how things were at that time:

I was hungry.

Past future (Things that you thought were going to happen in the past)

When you talk about what happened after a certain time in the past, you just use the regular past tense:

We met at Rachel's house, and then we all went out to a bar.

But if you're thinking in the past perspective, you don't say what happened after. You only say what you thought was going to happen after:

We met a Rachel's house, and then we were all going to go out to a bar.

 

You usually use this kind of sentence when things actually turned out differently than you thought they would. For example:

We met a Rachel's house, and then we were all going to go out to a bar. But Rachel and her boyfriend got in a fight, so they ended up not coming.

Past time words

When you're speaking from the present perspective, you use time words like "now", "today", "tomorrow", "last week", and so on. When you're speaking from the past perspective, you use different words:

• now > at that time
• yesterday > the day before / the previous day
  
• today > that day
• tomorrow > the next day / the following day
• soon > soon after
• five minutes ago > five minutes before
• last summer > the previous summer / the summer before that
  
• next summer > the next summer / the summer after that
• before > before that
  

When to use the past perspective

So the difficult question is, when do you speak about the past from the present perspective, and when do you speak about it from the past perspective?

The best way to learn this is to pay attention to how English speakers talk about the past, and gradually build your understanding. But here are a few guides:

• Speak from the past perspective when you're telling a story.
• When someone uses "was ___ing", it often means that they're starting to speak from the past perspective.
• Use the present perspective to talk about events without giving much detail about them:

  Last year we went to his parents' place for Christmas, and the year before that we stayed at my sister's house.
  

• The perspective can be set by you, or by the people you're talking to. For example:

  A: I first met you at Lou's wedding, I believe.
  B: Actually, I think we had met once before that, but it was very briefly.