saarthak299 wrote:
I have been there many times in past
I had been there many times in past.
I know the first one is correct but I want to know why the second one is wrong.
If I remove "in past" at the end of the sentence
then which is correct and why?
English is not my native language but I need to know rules behind this one.
First, a little terminology:
have been there = present perfect tense
had been there = past perfect tense
There's a meaning difference between them, but it's pretty subtle (like previous posters have mentioned, it has to do with whether the action or its effects have continued into the present.) It's a fairly tough meaning difference to grasp even for native speakers, even if they're able to tell that one verb tense 'seems right' or 'seems wrong'.
Because the meaning difference is sort of tough, it's probably better to focus on the
grammar rules for using these two tenses. The rule for the past perfect on the GMAT is this:
You can only use the past perfect if the sentence has either a time marker, or another verb in the simple past tense. The action described by that verb or that time marker must have occurred more recently than the past perfect verb.
For example, the following sentences are correct. The past perfect verb is in
red, and the time marker or simple past verb is in
blue.
By the time they
arrived, I
had eaten all of the pancakes.
The novel
had not been published prior to
1981.
Before entering kindergarten, she
had already learned to count to 100.
This sentence is wrong because there's no time marker:
I had eaten all of the pancakes.
This sentence is wrong because there's a time marker, but it happened
before the past perfect verb. The time marker has to describe something that happened
afterwards.
I made a dozen pancakes and had eaten all of them.
---
For the present perfect, the only grammar rule is that you can't use it if there's a definite end point to the action. For instance, this sentence is correct:
I have studied eight languages.
But this sentence is incorrect:
Before starting high school, I have studied eight languages.
It's incorrect because 'before starting high school' implies that there's an endpoint to the studying that you're describing. If there's an endpoint, you can't use the present perfect.