Past Perfect v Present Perfect 现在完成时和过去完成时的区别

This week Finn and Wang Fei are in the BBC Learning English restaurant, where they are ordering some tasty food such as 口水鸡、羊肉串儿 and 回锅肉。

While they are ordering the food, they ask each other if they have tried these foods before.

The questions they ask either use the past perfect or present perfect tense.

Listen to the programme to see if you can tell which tense is which.

Here is a simple guide to the difference.

1) Present perfect

We use the present perfect to describe or ask about something that happened at an unspecified time in the past. We use has or have with the past participle, for example:

Have you visited Paris?

2) Past perfect

We use it to describe a completed action that happened in the past, before another event in the past. This time we use had plus the past participle.

Had you visited Paris before you went to London?

If you have a question about the English language, email us at chinaelt@bbc.co.uk.

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