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
I want to know how to use "the past perfect continuous" with "would rather".
Do these make sense?
I would rather you had been revising for the last ten minutes. I would rather you had been visiting them for the last week. I would rather you had been going swimming for the last week of our holiday at the seaside.
Well yes, it's probably grammatical, but my brain gave up trying to understand the sentence about half way into the verb phrase - and that is a good sign that something is wrong.
English tends to be analytical, which means that that you can create a long verb phrase from many words, using auxiliaries, modals and so on (rather than by synthetically modifying the form of the verb itself) This doesn't mean that such a phrase is clear or is likely to be understood.
So, no, don't do that. Say:
You should've been revising for the last ten minutes.
Why didn't you visit them last week?
I wish you'd gone swimming during the last week of our holiday at the seaside.
These don't mean exactly the same, but they have the great advantage of being understandable.
