Since the whole story started with a sentence about "studying French", I might mention here that, in the French language, similar constructions, called "temps surcomposés" are also a matter of debate, like in the sentence : "Quand il a eu fini de manger" (literally: "after he has had finished eating"). The problem here is that the more standard sentence "Quand il eut fini de manger" makes use of a past form of the auxiliary verb avoir ("eut") which nowadays feels a bit too formal in casual speech, so that people are tempted to replace it by the equivalent compound form "a eu". This is all right when "avoir" is used of its own, but results in piling up past participles in this kind of sentence.
Whether my remark is relevant to the present discussion I will leave to more expert readers…

Thora Wrote:@Javizy - As JimmySeal mentioned, the OP's main sentence is past tense ("she was able to") and using "having studied" (perfect participle) indicates a prior past action. "Had studied" or "Had been studying" would also work.

Your "has studied" would work in a present tense sentence. (Or "studied")
(btw, I think US and UK English use certain tenses a bit differently, so you may encounter examples that sound a bit strange to you.)

Good point, and a ケアレスミス by me.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she is considering becoming a translator.
She has studied Japanese to mastery, so she is considering becoming a translator.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she decided to become a translator.
She had studied Japanese to mastery, so she decided to become a translator.

I think my confusion came from the last sentence. Although her decision was in the past, the mastery could still be very relevant to the present (depending on the context and my perception). Saying 'she had studied' made me think 'well, what about now?' It doesn't quite feel right with 'has' though. I guess it's me who needs to review the perfect...

Javizy Wrote:

Thora Wrote:@Javizy - As JimmySeal mentioned, the OP's main sentence is past tense ("she was able to") and using "having studied" (perfect participle) indicates a prior past action. "Had studied" or "Had been studying" would also work.

Your "has studied" would work in a present tense sentence. (Or "studied")
(btw, I think US and UK English use certain tenses a bit differently, so you may encounter examples that sound a bit strange to you.)

Good point, and a ケアレスミス by me.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she is considering becoming a translator.
She has studied Japanese to mastery, so she is considering becoming a translator.

Having studied Japanese to mastery, she decided to become a translator.
She had studied Japanese to mastery, so she decided to become a translator.

I think my confusion came from the last sentence. Although her decision was in the past, the mastery could still be very relevant to the present (depending on the context and my perception). Saying 'she had studied' made me think 'well, what about now?' It doesn't quite feel right with 'has' though. I guess it's me who needs to review the perfect...

Indeed, 'having verb-ed' can preface either a current (or future) or past element (I tried to show that in my examples), but 'had verb-ed' or 'have/has verb-ed' keeps the prefaced element in the past or present, respectively. Because they're the same, narratively, but convey different possibilities of tense or whatnot, that's why 'having had studied' is so awkward, because it's both redundant and conflicting.

As for what pm215 said with regards to 'had to', that works, though I kind of think of the 'had to' as a separate idiomatic construction from 'had', perhaps an elliptically passive or possessive colloquial offshoot? ...

I originally wrote you could probably modify 'had studied' and 'have studied' in order to have those preface something in the present or past, respectively, using time-specific words to locate each action in a specific context to be contrasted (edit: e.g. with 'though'/'but'/etc.), but the examples I came up with to myself felt awkward and only someone who writes as convoluted as me could get away with it, methinks, so I'll keep those thoughts to myself. Thinking them over, I think they 'break' the narrative (i.e. a self-contained chronology) and would be sort of pointless to keep except for comments like this one that test out the limits of the construction without altering it.

Ahha! I think I got it...

"I have studied French, but I couldn't use it when I went to France last week." - The relevance of the unmet expectations is still contemporary even though it's referring to a past event that occurred after the 'have studied'...

"Though I had studied French religiously at one point, I can't use it now." - The time specification emphasizes the completed aspect of the previous studies, allowing the reference to present knowledge to convey more disconnection in retrospect.

Yup, I made those up but I think they're correct. For now... "Having" just makes it so much easier, though. ;p

Those aren't "having Ved" type sentences, though. Rewriting the original "having V-ed" sentence created limitations because the participle clause ("having studied...,") has to relate to the verb tense of the main sentence.

So are you moving on to more general thoughts about the uses of present and past perfect? Best to just take at what's written about it, if you're curious. Or, even better, get back to your Japanese projects...

Sentence 1: The present perfect can have the sense of したことがある, right? "Have you ever studied French?" More about the fact of experience, than timeline or consequence?

Sentence 2: Simple past works here. The "at one point" makes it clear that the period of study was entirely in the past. Without it, I suppose using the past perfect would emphasize that your studies ended in the past. who knows.

@thistime: Don't worry, I found that ESL learners knew far more grammer than I did. I'm from the No Grammar/No Red Pen generation, so I had a lot of catching up to do just to understand students' questions. I actually find grammar interesting now - especially the differences between languages and what that might say about them.

nadiatims Wrote:The 'studied' in the first sentence isn't past tense of the verb, it's the past participle (p.p).
'Had' in the second sentence is the p.p of 'have'. The p.p of a verb is often the same as its past tense which I suppose could be annoying to many learners.
eat, ate, eaten
speak, spoke, spoken
have, had, had
study, studied, studied

The second sentence is incorrect. 'Have' + p.p is a common English construction which Japanese kids learn in the 3rd year of Junior High School but you can't have two past participles appearing next to each other (*there is one exception). Even if one of them is past tense, its still incorrect because the past tense of a verb can only appear in initial position. It might be best to think of the past participle and the 'ing' form as a nomilisation of the verb, because then you can apply the following rule. You can never have two verbs appearing next to each other in English.

*the exception: the P.P can appear after 'been' (which is the p.p of 'be'). Example:
After having been eaten by a lion....

nadiatims FTW.

Thora Wrote:Those aren't "having Ved" type sentences, though. Rewriting the original "having V-ed" sentence created limitations because the participle clause ("having studied...,") has to relate to the verb tense of the main sentence.

So are you moving on to more general thoughts about the uses of present and past perfect? Best to just take at what's written about it, if you're curious. Or, even better, get back to your Japanese projects...

Sentence 1: The present perfect can have the sense of したことがある, right? "Have you ever studied French?" More about the fact of experience, than timeline or consequence?

Sentence 2: Simple past works here. The "at one point" makes it clear that the period of study was entirely in the past. Without it, I suppose using the past perfect would emphasize that your studies ended in the past. who knows.

@thistime: Don't worry, I found that ESL learners knew far more grammer than I did. I'm from the No Grammar/No Red Pen generation, so I had a lot of catching up to do just to understand students' questions. I actually find grammar interesting now - especially the differences between languages and what that might say about them.

If you're talking to me... yes, I was simply illustrating exceptions to my little extemporaneous rule-making exercise, re: matching tenses/sense of the contemporaneous, etc., strictly using those structures (however you want to label them, pluperfect etc.), 'had verb-ed', 'has/have verb-ed', 'having verb-ed', based on how they're similar/conflict when 'prefacing'. Once you see the 'having verb-ed,' you're expecting the follow-up, but it can be in the past or present or future, etc. But when you see 'had' or 'has/have', you're looking for something to follow up in the same general timeline. Your Sentence 1 and 2 explanations, you just repeated what I said in my first comment and right next to the example sentences in my previous comment! ;p

Why would you think it's best for me to take what's written about it? If there's anything written about it that's different from what I've said here, it's most likely wrong. ^_^ The rest is just me musing for my own, well a-muse-ment. The OP has moved on, and hopefully any L2 people have learned not to look to someone like me for tips. ;p

Oh

Quote:Your Sentence 1 and 2 explanations, you just repeated what I said in my first comment and right next to the example sentences in my previous comment! ;p

No. Your first earlier posts were about perfect participle (having). Neither sentence uses that. And we have different ideas on the sentences (as I understand your comments.) But none of this matters - so let's leave at that.

Thora Wrote:Oh

Quote:Your Sentence 1 and 2 explanations, you just repeated what I said in my first comment and right next to the example sentences in my previous comment! ;p

No. Your first earlier posts were about perfect participle (having). Neither sentence uses that. And we have different ideas on the sentences (as I understand your comments.) But none of this matters - so let's leave at that.

I meant where I described 'having' as evoking a kind of potential immediacy (like 'have/has') when referencing a past possession (the possession as I used it being the quality of an experience)... it was a sentiment I echoed in my first example in the comment you replied to, where I emphasized the contemporaneous weight of the unmet expectations (the semantic context vs. the situational context).

For the second sentence (and before it) I mentioned the use of specific times--in this particular structure of the 'perfects' being used to preface another event--as allowing for flexibility (in breaking the usual connotation and locating that event closer to or further away from the situational context, et cetera.) I tried to magnify this by contrasting events within the sentence explicitly, rather than the tacit contrast of semantic/situational...

I also explained that I thought it was pointless to stretch without altering, i.e. add modifications to make them fit, except for the purposes of my comment-exercise. In a sense I conjured up these rules based on thwarted connotations* as an explanation for why the OP example in question was jarring rather than simply 'seldom used' (I was arguing with an imaginary and extremely descriptive grammatician [grammarian]), but to make those exceptions work as I played devil's advocate and tested my explanation, in addition to becoming awkward, they eventually warped the construction to the point that they wouldn't have had an overall contribution to the connotations of 'having', et al., regardless. That preemptive admission based on the specific purpose of using those particular examples rigidly, I feel, rendered moot what you said about using another form ('simple past' or 'have you ever studied French?') ...

I threw in the bit about 'having' making it easier because it allows for all those variations, without having to add 'at one point', 'but', etc.

Lastly, you'll note none of my comments initially addressed the actual problem, but were tangential to it, because the basics were a given that I knew others would cover, so I wanted to focus on things like why the Google results confused some into thinking it was common, descriptive grammar and terminology, etc. Only after the OP moved on and comments continued for some time did I decide to return and really look at the initial problem in more detail, but from a more interesting angle (to me), (thus my confusion at being suggested to 'just take what's written elsewhere' rather than play with the language explanations on a subtler level).

*Thwarted connotations in the sense of you're reading it, 'having' indicates this potential immediacy or past reference, then 'had' comes in, both resonating/repeating the latter potential and closing off the former before the completion of the sentence affirms this prioritization of the second of the redundant syntactical elements. Thus the exercise of the fanatical, imaginary descriptivist antagonist was to offset this subjectively 'jarring' component I suggested by lessening the contributing resonance of the connotations via exceptions that it was my task to design: uses of the present and past perfect in that type of sentence structure that don't necessarily maintain an immediacy or distance, respectively, for the prefaced event.

This comment has been extensively rewritten for clarity. You're welcome. ^_^ Took a while to pare it down. I will title the longform version either "Having said that: Kanjis Gramophone" or "iRuiner: A Pluperfect Aesthetics" ...