Some people in another forum are discussing this question, and still they are not sure about the correct answer, so I decided to post it here to ask the right phrase.
John went to a concert last month. The concert was boring and John wished [ at that time ] that the concert had been over / finished soon. And now he’s narrating this memory to someone else now. How should we say it?
John: You know Kate, last month I went to a concert with some friends of mine, but It was not my cup of tea and it was so boring. I wished that it would be over soon.
Or, I wished that it’d been over soon. ?
How nice it would be if grammatical point was explained.
I don’t agree with “had wished.” It might be grammatically correct but it has an awkward sound.
There are a couple of phrases you could choose to convey the same meaning, BTW
You know Kate, last month I went to a concert with some friends of mine, but It was not my cup of tea and it was so boring. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
You know Kate, last month I went to a concert with some friends of mine, but It was not my cup of tea and it was so boring. I thought it would never end.
The concert was boring and John wished that the concert would be over / finished soon.
This is the minimal change needed. You want the tense in “concert was boring” and “John wished” to be the same since these two actions are happening at the same time relative to the present. That is, they both started and finished at a definite time in the past, so use the simple past tense. (Note that “boring” here acts as an adjective, rather than forming the past progressive.) You need “would be” because John is wishing for something that, at that time, isn’t actually true (or might not be true), so you need the conditional. His wishing is for something that he wants to happen in the future, and “would be” is the future conditional.
Actually, I think that “would be” is used whenever you are talking about an action in the past that refers to a later action, but I don’t know the term for that. For example, it would be correct to say, “The concert would be over soon.” In this case there is no conditional but we still say “would.”
ETA: “Had wished” is not the right tense. It is past perfect, which describes an action that took place in the past before another past action. For example, “John had wished the concert would end soon, but it lasted another two hours.”
In my experience, nobody really ever uses “wish” in this context in the past tense. Wishing usually deals with the subjunctive mood, and people rarely ever talk about their past wishes. Something like “When I was a little girl, I wished to be a unicorn” would be less awkward, but even then, “I wanted to be a unicorn” would probably be best. “I wished I had a pony,” on the other hand, sounds just fine.
But if there’s any other way to express a past wish, in particular when the wishes aren’t dreamy long-term things, then it would be less awkward to use a different wording entirely. I’d go for the suggested “I couldn’t wait for it to be over” or “I couldn’t wait for it to end.”
Depends on whether you’re having a conversation with a friend, or writing a novel. I think in a written narrative the usage described in this thread is appropriate.
Yes, I don’t think “would” is conditional in this context. There’s no condition after all, no “if” or “when” or whatever. “Would” is just the past tense of “will”, here.
Personally, I don’t see much wrong with sentence as given in the OP. One might use the subjunctive and phrase it “I wished that it be over soon”.
Good point. I think a lot of things change with narratives due to the use of past tense to describe things that are effectively “happening now” in the reader’s perspective.
If the concert were happening now, you’d say “I wish this concert would be over,” and so in a narrative you’d use the corresponding “I wished that the concert would be over,” as was originally stated.
