10. The Past Perfect Continuous Tense
I had been working We had been working
You had been working You had been working
He/She/It had been working They had been working
The past perfect continuous tense is quite like the past perfect tense except it expresses longer actions in the past before another action in the past.
Look at the following examples:-
- The nurse was very exhausted as she had been working a 20-hour shift.
- It was past her bedtime. She had been waiting to get home since 10 o’clock.
- My muscles ached after yesterday’s jog. I had not been running for a while now.
2 users commented in " The Past Perfect Continuous Tense "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackGood post… do you think you could give more examples though? I know this is a tough tense to learn and practice well.
Thank you for your positive comment. The Past Perfect Continuous tense is usually used to make sense when you want to convey the message of two past actions; one action is longer (”had been”) than the other.
Here are more examples. I hope they will help other readers understand this tense better.
• It had been snowing all night. The grounds were a perfect white.
• If you had been studying hard, you would have a better scoring.
• My grandmother had not been eating very well of late. She had lost some weight.
• I had not been feeling well, so I consulted a doctor this afternoon.
• Mary had been cooking all day, before her children came home to visit.
• Dad had been working very hard in the office, he needed to take time off to relax.
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