Word
Estaba a punto de salir, pero el catálogo todavía no había llegado.
Meaning
I was about to leave, but the catalogue had not yet arrived.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Estaba a punto de salir, pero el catálogo todavía no había llegado.
no
no / not
pero
but
llegar
to arrive
salir
to go out, to leave / to appear, to come out (on the body)
Questions & Answers about Estaba a punto de salir, pero el catálogo todavía no había llegado.
Where exactly should I place todavía no when using compound tenses like the past perfect?
In Spanish, time markers like todavía no (not yet) and ya (already) usually go right before the conjugated verb. With compound tenses, they go before the auxiliary verb haber. You cannot put them between había and llegado, and putting them at the very end of the sentence is much less natural than it is in English.
Why use the past perfect había llegado instead of the simple past llegó?
How does the phrase estaba a punto de work?
The expression estar a punto de means to be about to do something. Because you are describing an ongoing situation or intention in the background of the past, you use the imperfect tense estaba. This phrase is always followed by an infinitive, which is why we use the unconjugated verb salir right after it.