Do I need to treat the phrase "I recently heard that" as a reported speech?
"I recently heard that you went to Paris in 2000."
I'm not sure if this phrase can be completed by using simple past since I'm referencing a specific time (2000), or if this phrase should be treated as a reported speech and therefore be completed with past perfect, like this:
I recently heard that you had gone to Paris in 2000."
It seems like I can treat this phrase as a reported speech because I am talking about something I heard from someone, but I'm not sure which sentence is more grammatically correct and sounds more natural.
Best Answer
You can replace I recently heard that ... with an expression such as John told me yesterday that ..., so this can be regarded as an instance of reported speech.
As to the tense, it is possible you have learned some rules about backshift which makes you uncertain which tense to use in the reported clause. Swan, in Practical English Usage, has some useful advice here:
So if Mary told you:
you would naturally report this back to John as:
The past perfect is used to emphasise that something happened before another past event. So this is possible:
But even here I suspect that most native speakers would use the simple went.