Confusion using simple past and past perfect tenses.

[aachu]

Though it may invite ridicule but I have to say. I don't know when to use simple past and perfect tenses. Can anyone of the kind teachers please tell what does it take to make past simple a past perfect tense? I mean how old an event can be categorized into a past perfect tense?

For example I say, "I made so many mistake in my article".
When am I supposed to say , "I had made so many mistakes in my article"?

thanks in anticipation.

 

[5jj]

Apart from in counterfactual conditional utterances, you do not need to use the past perfect unless you wish to make it absolutely clear that one past action occurred before a later past action, as in:

When I arrived, he had left.

Try the 'Similar Threads' at the bottom of this page, and come back if you have specific questions.

 

[aachu]

Sir Fivejj thank you for your valuable post. Now, what I could get from your above post and the links you advised me to have a look at, I should try not to use past perfect tense in sentences like: I had made so many mistakes. Is that so? Simple past would suffice in these kind of sentences. Rest, i.e. use in counter-factual scenarios, and describing an event that has occurred before another, is very much understood.

 

[5jj]

Sir Fivejj thank you for your valuable post. Now, what I could get from your above post and the links you advised me to have a look at, I should try not to use past perfect tense in sentences like:" I had made so many mistakes". Is that so? Simple past would suffice in these kind of sentences.

It's impossible to say without more context.