2019-09-17
4 分钟Hi there, this is Harry from www.englishlessonviaskype.com and welcome back to my English learning podcast where I'm trying to help you improve your spoken English and also the grammatical points around that.The sentence that I have for you today is - We got to the park quite late after lunch and fortunately the rain had stopped by then. Past perfect tense. Past simple. The sequence of tenses.Learn English with me. Improve your conversational skills in my Easy Peasy English learning club http...
Hi there.
This is Harry, and welcome back to our english podcasts, where we try to help you with your english language for those of you at the around intermediate level.
And we do it by using some sentences and explaining the grammar points and other aspects of those sentences.
So let's start with the first.
We got to the park quite late after lunch, and fortunately the rain had stopped by then.
Second reading, we got to the park quite late after lunch, and fortunately, the rain had stopped by then.
So what does the sentence mean?
Well, we had intended to go to the park when we made the decision it was raining.
We waited until after lunch, and we waited a little bit of time.
It wasn't immediately after lunch, it was quite late after lunch, and by the time we got to the park, the rain had stopped.
So that's the meaning of the sentence.
So what are the main grammar points here?
We're using the past perfect, and we have the past perfect.
The rain had stopped.
Had stopped.
Is that past perfect, the past participle?
And we use the past perfect where there's one event that happened before another event.
So the second event is that we got to the park, and the first event is that it had stopped raining.
Okay, so we can use the past perfect.
By the time we got to the park, it had stopped raining.