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Both “she said goodbye too many times before” and “she had said goodbye too many times before” are grammatically correct English. They have slightly different

• denton-scratch 3y ago
  Agreed; "she said goodbye too many times before" is grammatical. But it's temporally ambiguous. The sentence is reporting on a time in the past, a time when "her" utterances were even further in the past. I suggested rephrasing prior to translation, to clarify the tense of "said". As someone upthread noted, it's a song, so prosody is more important than grammar. But I think it's still an ugly construction. [Edit] I'm not sure what tense it is; I'm a native English speaker, and I don't think I was ever taught the grammar of my own language. I don't think it's past-perfect/pluperfect; that would be "she has said" (she has finished saying it). Wikipedia disagrees, but doesn't say what tense "she has said" is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect