If they made / had made it to the garage...

[BestBuddy]

We cannot put articicial restrictions on the way people use tenses and aspects.

But you do, especially when I say "Have you read your book today yet?", you say it's always about the whole book while I just want to ask my son if he has done his session of reading that book today or he hasn't and still have to do it before going to bed.

The (slight) difference in meaning between 'when' and 'if' in those sentences has nothing to do with frequency.

This is not my opinion.

1. If = when ("if" instead of "when" just shows that it happened not very often)

• When I got home late, she got upset. (One specific occasion)
• When I got home late, she got upset. (Many times in the past)
• If I got home late, she got upset. (Not so many times in the past)

This was told to me by an English teacher. So, again, this is not my opinion but I do agree.

My point is that we cannot tell what situations those two sentences refer to unless we have context.

Again, my opinion is:

Some native English teachers told me that the third conditional shows unreal situation and from the sentence using the third conditional itself we can get the information about what happened: "If he hadn't done it, he would..." — He did it, and we know it just from the sentence.
"If I hadn't studied hard at school, I would..." - here from the sentence itself we know that "I" studied hard at school.
This is why I think it's very important for us, in order to make language we speak clearer and better, to use the third conditional only when we know what really happened.

For the reason I wrote at the top of this post I do believe it's not right to use the unreal third conditional for the situations where we don't know what happened, otherwise the person we're talking to will get the wrong information unless we give him extra context.

"If he hadn't done it, ..." - we know just from the sentence that he did it.
"If he did it, ..." it's either the second (hypothetical about the present or future) or real past where we can either state a fact or speculate not knowing what happened. This is where especially we need extra context.

When I want to talk about my childhood trauma caused by not being allowed to go to amusement parks because my mother would freak out if I even mentioned rollercoasters, can we call it the second conditional?

No, I don't think it's the second one. You describe your real past, so it's very good for me. Nothing wrong with it.

You've ventured into the uncharted territory of structures that are either uncategorized, or those that have been categorized, but differently by different grammarians. We all have very strong opinions about this. Keep that in mind when reading posts from those who have most likely spent more time than you on trying to make sense of it, and try to get as much as you can from learning how they see it from their perspective.

Those people who, as you said, "have most likely spent more time than you on trying to make sense of it" sometimes just express their opinion not even trying to understand what the asker means. So they have their own opinion to express and don't even bother themselves trying to understand other people's opinions.

 

[emsr2d2]

But you do, especially when I say "Have you read your book today yet?", you say it's always about the whole book while I just want to ask my son if he has done his session of reading that book today or he hasn't and still have to do it before going to bed.

I don't have time to go through the whole thread at the moment, but "Have you read your book yet today?" doesn't refer to reading the whole book from start to finish. It means "Have you read any part of your book yet today?"

 

[Tarheel]

I don't have time to go through the whole thread at the moment, but "Have you read your book yet today?" doesn't refer to reading the whole book from start to finish. It means "Have you read any part of your book yet today?"

That's what I thought everybody who commented on it said.

 

[5jj]

Those people who, as you said, "have most likely spent more time than you on trying to make sense of it" sometimes just express their opinion not even trying to understand what the asker means. So they have their own opinion to express and don't even bother themselves trying to understand other people's opinions.

My opinion is that if you keep expressing negative opinions about the people who give up their free time in an attempt to help you, you may find that some of them will give up trying.