Spanish · Chapter 9 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer
Pluperfect subjunctive
On the AQA A-level grammar list.
The short version
Nothing in -ría ever follows si
The third conditional has a fixed shape: si plus the pluperfect subjunctive, then the conditional perfect. English 'if I would have known' tempts learners into si habría sabido, and Spanish forbids it outright. The si half carries hubiera; habría waits its turn in the result half.
Si hubiera sabido, habría venido.
The hubiera swap runs one way only
Across most of the Spanish-speaking world, real speech puts hubiera in the result half too, and it is idiomatic rather than sloppy. Use it and you sound more native, not less. But the swap only runs in one direction: hubiera can move into the result, and habría can never move into the si half.
Si hubiera sabido, hubiera venido.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 22 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 5 of 11 in this chapter