The past tense is for a past activity. The past perfect tense is more complicated. From an online ref: http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html h

The past tense is for a past activity. The past perfect tense is more complicated. From an online ref: http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html http://www.englishpage.com/verbpage/pastperfect.html "With Non-Continuous Verbs and some non-continuous uses of Mixed Verbs, we use the Past Perfect to show that something started in the past and continued up until another action in the past." Which is a more precise statement than it was just in the past. Languages are full of such corner cases. I was once asked by a non-native English speaker what the differences were between the following phrases: * I went to the store * I was going to the store * I have gone to the store * I had gone to the store * I had been going to the store * I have been going to the store All of the phrases refer to actions in the past. The differences between the phrases indicate where it was a past event that was one-off, or continuous, or whether it started in the past and continued to the present, or started in the past and ended in the past. Language tenses exist for a reason. Simply denying them is delusional, IMHO.