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I had never done anything crazy in my life before I started learning how to skydive five months ago.

I never did anything crazy in my life before I started learning......

Are both the above sentences grammatically correct? I see natives not using past perfects all the time.

I was on this site and if you would scroll down a bit, you'd see a sentence:

"She never saw a bear before she moved to Alaska."

It is deemed incorrect.

Nathan Tuggy
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lekon chekon
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  • From a letter by Ernest Hemingway, Bessie never saw the war until it was hopelessly lost but he was a fine guy and brave soldier ... --Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961, page 498. – Damkerng T. Jun 14 '16 at 20:08
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    In some contexts, such as I never ate* snails before I spent a month in Paris* vs I had never eaten* snails before..., some people might identify a nuanced difference. Simple past could work better with ...but I eat them every week now, where past perfect is more appropriate for ...and I'm never going to eat them again after that experience!* But for your context there's no such nuance - so as ever, the simple answer is *use the simplest tense acceptable for the context*. I'm pretty sure that's advice you've been given here before. – FumbleFingers Jun 14 '16 at 20:14
  • @FumbleFingers

    So, which of two sentences given below would you use?

    I had thought god didn't exist until a few days ago when you showed persuaded me into believing in the existence of god.

    I thought god didn't exist until a few days ago when you showed persuaded me into believing in the existence of god.

     – lekon chekon Jun 15 '16 at 08:04
  • I see people not using the past perfect in colloquial speech, but when i'm reading something, I usually see them using past perfect every 2-3 sentences. @DamkerngT. – lekon chekon Jun 15 '16 at 08:05
  • A good rule of thumb (as previously stated) is that you should think in terms of avoiding Past Perfect unless you're sure you need it, rather than looking for possible justifications. Sure - in your example, being an atheist comes *before* being persuaded otherwise. But that's contextually obvious, and doesn't need underlining with a tense shift. Consider this NGram. – FumbleFingers Jun 15 '16 at 12:07

1 Answers1

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To my eye, both sentences parse properly without obvious error. In everyday (American) English you won't have any issues with being understood correctly in situations like you are describing, nor will anyone complain about your using the preterite. Many, perhaps most, native English speakers will not notice if you use one form or the other.

That said, I personally prefer using the past perfect tense in these cases. Modifying the second example in your post

She [had never seen] a bear before she moved to Alaska.

indicates a state which persisted for an unspecified amount of time, and that state ended with a particular event. Conversely, the preterite

She never saw a bear before she moved to Alaska.

suggests a particular event at a particular time. It is a little bit odd with an extended but undefined time period in which the event did not ever occur, but there is no confusion nor any ambiguity of meaning.

If the time period were better defined the preterite form would sound modestly more natural to me, but not so much so that I would say you definitely should use one form over the other:

In the ten years before she moved to Alaska, she never saw a bear.

<p>In the ten years before she moved to Alaska, she had never seen a bear.</p>
Upper_Case
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  • I think the conjunction before cause a need for time-description in listener/reader. Therefore, you have three situations. #1 two actions happen subsequently. #2 They do not happen subsequently and you use past perfect and past event to stand out the order of events. #3 They do not happen subsequently and you provide detailed information about the time of each event. Am I right? – Cardinal Jun 14 '16 at 19:10
  • @Cardinal I'm not 100% sure I know what you mean by subsequently here-- do you mean simultaneously, that they occur at the same time? Otherwise, I think that you are mostly correct.

    In these sentences the word before is not a conjunction but a preposition because it describes the relative positions (in time) of two things. Using before as it is here automatically associates the noun phrases with each other and requires that one occur prior to the other. This leads to either situation (2) or (3), and you can add as much detail about timing as you need to convey your meaning.

     – Upper_Case Jun 14 '16 at 20:14
  • My intention behind the "subsequently" was a description for a course of actions in which one action is performed immediately after the other- a chain of two events. – Cardinal Jun 14 '16 at 20:24