<p>How do you know when to use perfect tense? For example, is it </p>
<li>I had thrown a ball at him.
or</li>
<li>I threw a ball at him.</li>
</ol>
<p>The past perfect is used pretty rarely: you normally use the simple past tense.</p>
<p>The rule is that, if you are talking about two events in the past, you might use the past perfect to show which of the two events came first: “Before I became a bus driver, I had served in the military for three years,” or whatever. In this case, you use the past perfect (“had served”) in the second half of the sentence, to show that those events happened before the events in the first half of the sentence.</p>
<p>Because the past perfect is used to show that an event happened BEFORE another event in the past, it is sometimes called the “past-of-the-past.”</p>
<p>In real writing, the past perfect is not usually necessary if you’re listing events in chronological order: for example, you could write “First I got up, then I went downstairs, then I ate breakfast,” without ever using the past perfect, because you are listing events in the order in which they occurred. However, if you list events out of their chronological order, you might want to use the past perfect: for example, you might write, “I went downstairs after I had gotten up, and then I ate breakfast.”</p>
<p>For that reason, the past perfect is often used to provide flashbacks or background information.</p>