"I thought we talked..." vs. "I thought we had talked..."

Question

I'm not a native English speaker and I find English quite difficult and confusing and one of the reasons is because of its tenses—which I find challenging and rewarding once everything becomes clear—so I would like to ask which of these two are correct:

1. I thought we talked about this before
2. I thought we had talked about this before

I've read somewhere that I should use the past perfect tense to indicate past action that occurred prior to another past action, and Past perfect verbs are always formed by using adding ‘had’ before the past participle form of the verb.

E.g. had + talked

In the examples above, "thought" and "talked" are both past actions, but "talked" happened before "thought", so my guess is that sentence no. 2 is the correct one, but I'm not so sure because sentence no. 1 is used most of the time in movies and conversation.

What are your thoughts about this?

Answer 1

As is so often the case, the context in which something is said is the main determiner of which tense is appropriate. Correctness of tense may be important, but not nearly as important as being understood, n'est-ce pas?

For example, if two people are conversing, and one person brings up a subject unnecessarily (at least in the opinion of the other person), the person who objects to the repetition might say,

I thought we talked about this before.

Meaning: Why are you bringing this up again? We talked about ___________ before.

On the other hand, imagine the same two people conversing, and one of them, in looking back on an incident which occurred, say, a day ago, says

I thought we had talked about this before.

If the context of this remark is such that the speaker is considering some past action of his and is telling another person what he was thinking of at that particular time, then the meaning of the words would be slightly different.

In other words, he is looking back and referring to an action which had already been completed. This context is slightly different from the context in which the speaker is simply referring in the present to something which has already been done. No qualifying verb such as "had talked" would then be needed.

It's a slippery concept, to be sure, and one which even native speakers do not always grasp. However, the shades and nuances of meaning can be important when precision in communication is needed. In normal, everyday conversation, though, such precision is not usually that important.

Answer 2

It depends on the context.

1) Past perfect is used to set the time of an event before a previously mentioned past time (or a past time that is clearly implied to all speakers)

2) Past simple is used simply to place an event before the present.

So, for the first case:

I know we talked about it earlier, but I thought we had talked about it before.

Because the second talk precedes a previous, also in the past, event.

or

Why did you bring that up this morning? I thought we had talked about it before.

Because the talk precedes a defined time of "this morning"

For the second case:

Do we have to talk about this now? I think we talked about it earlier.

In this case the second talk precedes the present, so past simple is used.

I hope this helps :)

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Notice how it is rarely "wrong" to use past simple when a past perfect could be used, because after all both events are still in the past. However, past perfect adds clarity and is a very useful tool.

It is always wrong to use past perfect when you should use past simple. "I'm tired because I had gone to bed late last night" is wrong, because you are tired now.

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I hope this helps :)