### 过去完成时 Do you remember how we learned a couple of lessons back how to create Swedish present perfect? If you do, then this is going to be a real breeze! In the present perfect lesson, we learned how we could form sentences such as: *Jag har ätit* = I have eaten *Du har hört* = You have heard We're now going to create very similar sentences, but they are going to take place in the past! *Jag hade ätit* = I had eaten *Du hade hört* = You had heard We still use the supine form to create the past perfect, but with the past tense form *hade* instead of the present tense *ha*. Let's take a look at the same table on how to use the supine as we did in the present perfect lesson, but update it for the past perfect instead: | Infinitive | Past perfect | English translation | | --- | --- | --- | | prata | hade pratat | talk | | höra | hade hört | hear | | klä | hade klätt | dress, get dressed | | äta | hade ätit | eat | All in all, the Swedish past perfect works much the same way as it does in English: *Jag blev bjuden på middag men jag hade redan ätit.* I was invited to dinner but I had already eaten. Knowing how to use the past perfect is extremely useful for those times when you have to describe what happened in the past, such as what you did last weekend. Oh, and one last thing. As you know by now, the very common words *sade* and *lade* are pronounced just *sa* and *la* in Swedish. But this is not the case with *hade* - it's actually pronounced as though it were written *hadde*.