Hi. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can start using one of the advanced tenses right away, and that is the past perfect tense. Now, there are many ways to master the tenses. In English, we have 12 different tenses, and I have a special program, special course with lots of videos on each and every one of these tenses, which you should definitely watch if you haven't had a chance to see it already. And I have one on the past perfect tense as well, a complete lesson. I will send... Give you the links, okay, to those... Those courses. But what we're going to do today will allow you to jump in and start using the tense right away, because there are two ways to improve your English. One is, of course, to study the grammar and so on, and understand the structure, and when to use it, and what to do. And the other is just jump in, try to understand what's being said, and you might just get it right away. And I think that in this case, that's what will happen for you. So, let's look at how to use this past perfect tense. So, let's just start with a little intro to show you a timeline here. In this timeline, we see this is now, everything before this is the past, and everything after this is the future. In the past, we can use the past simple to talk about anything that happened before now, but if we want to talk about more than one thing that happened in the past, then we use the past perfect to show that in the past, a few things happened, but this happened first in the past, and then something else happened, okay? That's the only theory you're going to get. Let's look at the examples so I think you will understand very clearly. The first one, I had planned to call you, but my phone died. Now, in this example, I had planned is what? This is the past perfect, that was what I had decided earlier, that is what I had planned, but then my phone died, just past simple. So, in this particular structure that I'm showing you today, with all of the examples, you're going to see that somebody had a plan, but then life happened, and something, there was another result, and I'm sure that all of us can apply this situation and this context to our lives. Let's look at another example. I had hoped to meet John, but he left early. So, where's the past perfect here? Here, I had hoped, right? I had hoped to meet John, but he left early. Left is the past simple. So, in this kind of construction, we're using past perfect and then past simple, okay? Next, I had wanted to study tonight, but I was too tired, okay? Not a good idea if that happens too often, but it happens once in a while to all of us. So, what happened here? This person said, "I had wanted", right, past perfect, "to study tonight, but I was", right, past simple, "too tired". Alright? So, you see here, had planned, had hoped, had wanted, all of these are the past perfect. Yes, it's an advanced tense, but if you understand in what context we use it or why we use it, then it'll make more sense to you to want to use it and to be able to use it, right? But first, we have to understand why do we even have this? Well, it's to show that you had two things happen. One happened first and then another one happened, and all of them happened in the past. Let's look at some other verbs that we could use in the same way. I had decided to arrive home early, but there was a lot of traffic. Or, I had expected to receive their reply, but it didn't arrive. Or, he had promised to help me, but he had to work late. Or, she had offered to join me at the party, but she was out of town. Okay? So, the way that you could practice this is think about some situations in your own life, alright? Say what, maybe there was something that you had decided, but, alright? It doesn't always have to be used this way, but this is definitely one kind of sentence structure that we can use for that purpose, alright? So, here, we saw this pattern. We saw the past perfect tense with an infinitive, right? I had planned to call. I had hoped to meet. Infinitive means when we say to call, to meet. I had wanted to study. That is one way, and next, I'm going to show you another little way in which you can use the same pattern to help you start using the past perfect tense. Now, we'll see similar examples, except this time, after the past perfect, we don't need to have an infinitive, but we are using nouns. So, let's look at an example. We had ordered a large pizza, but they sent a small one. Oh no, what are we going to do? So, we had ordered is our past perfect, right? Sent is the past simple, but here, we see we had ordered a pizza, right? We don't need to say, use the infinitive after that for any reason because it wasn't necessary in this context, okay? Next, he had made an appointment, but it was postponed, alright? So, again, here, we have our past perfect and the past simple. He had made. Made what? An appointment. So, we just have a noun after that, and that's perfectly fine as well, okay? Next, she had requested a window seat, but none were available. So, again, she had requested what? A window seat, a noun, right? But none were available, alright? So, I hope you see that this past perfect tense, which is, as I said, an advanced tense, can nevertheless be very useful to talk about everyday life, to talk about different situations in your personal life, in your professional life, in your academic life, or anything else. The best way that you can really adopt this and start using it yourself is to write some examples for yourself about your life. Is there something that you had planned to do, but something happened? Is there something that you had hoped to do, or see, or watch, or read, or whatever, and something happened, and so on and so forth, okay? So, by writing those kind of examples about yourself, this will become a part of you, and it will become a more natural part of the way in which you communicate in English. And of course, check out the course, okay? If you want the full explanation of this past perfect tense, I have an entire video class on this tense, as well as classes and videos on every single one of the English verb tenses. So, check those out, go to www.engvid.com, do some more practice. You can definitely move forward in English every single day. Take care. Bye for now.