English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
A friend of mine invited me to visit her.
She was afraid that I would get lost, so she said she would be waiting for me at the bus station.
When we finally met at the bus station, I said,
"Sorry I am late. I have never been here."
Is it natural to say I have never been here in this conversation?
Or instead, should I say I have never been there?
Native speakers would typically say "I have never been here before" in this context.
You are talking about the place where you are currently, so here is correct. But the sentence "I have never been here" sounds self-contradictory: how can you have never been in the place where you are right now? Adding before restricts the "have never been" to the past and removes the contradiction.
"I've been..." said the soldier, trailing off as he peered around at the miraculous equipment in the secret laboratory. He suddenly remembered he had been speaking. "I've been to this building so many times, but I've never been *here*. What *is* this place?"
What you said is correct and natural. You use "here" when the place is near your current position, while "there" is used when the place is far from you. So, in the situation that you were already there, and you wanted to talk about the place you were in then "here" is the correct word of choice.
I would have said
Sorry I am late. I had never been here.
Because I would, at that moment, be there. Of course, I am not there now, so I do not use the word "here" now. But I would have used "here" in the moment. Now that I am no longer there, I say there. I am always here in the present, but in the past I may have been there. Although I was here in the morning as well.
The "before" at the end would magnify that sense of prior to that moment, but I think that the "had" is sufficient. There is an English grammar "rule" not to end sentences with a preposition, so some would prefer not to end the sentence with "before" to comply. However, non-compliance is common, particularly in spoken English. Adding the "before" to the sentence with "have" makes it descriptively correct if not perfect grammar.
You could also say
Sorry I am late. I had never been here previously.
"Previously" is never a preposition, so it won't make people think that you are ending a sentence with a preposition. But "previously" doesn't come through as naturally as "before" does. It sounds more stilted and formal.
Sorry I'm late. This is my first time here.
This also works.
To restate, here is where I am now. There is someplace that I am not currently. So in your original sentence, it should be "here" rather than "there" because you are currently at the time of speaking at that place.
Now, you might say
Sorry I was late. I had never been there.
Because you are presumably no longer in that place. So it is now there rather than here (wherever you may be now). Unless of course you are reading this on your mobile in the same location. Then you would properly still use here.
The answer to the question you asked is very clear: we say "here" when you are describing a place you are in (physically or metaphorically), and "there" when you're describing something you are far from or separate from.
However, as often happens on this site, the answerers seemed more interested in a different question: whether or not to say "before" at the end of your sentence. Nobody's cited any evidence, which is probably why we are seeing disagreement. (It seems like the disagreement is mostly due to personal preference.)
Looking at Google NGram, both are well-attested. The line on the chart for "never been here" should include every entry for "never been here before". It looks like about 60% of instances from this corpus are "never been here before", so this phrasing may be slightly privileged, but either one should be unremarkable. There was a brief period in the 1810s when "before" seems to have been required, but that looks like an unusual outlier from 200 years ago.
Now that I've complained about personal anecdotes, here's my own personal anecdote. For me, if I added "before", I would probably barely pronounce it: if I said it at all it would be as "I've never been here 'fore". I expect this means I would consider the word superfluous.
