I had been singing
How do we make the Past Perfect Continuous Tense?
The structure of the past perfect continuous tense is:
For negative sentences in the past perfect continuous tense, we insert not after the first auxiliary verb.
For question sentences, we exchange the subject and first auxiliary verb. Look at these example
sentences with the past perfect continuous tense:
When speaking with the past perfect continuous tense, we often contract the subject and first auxiliary
verb:
How do we use the Past Perfect Continuous Tense?
The past perfect continuous tense is like the past perfect tense, but it expresses longer actions in the
past before another action in the past. For example:
- Ram started waiting at 9am. I arrived at 11am. When I arrived, Ram had been waiting for two
hours.
Here are some more examples:
- John was very tired. He had been running.
- I could smell cigarettes. Somebody had been smoking.
- Suddenly, my car broke down. I was not surprised. It had not been running well for a long
time. - Had the pilot been drinking before the crash?
You can sometimes think of the past perfect continuous tense like the present perfect continuous tense,
but instead of the time being now the time is past.
