Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The Future Tense (Regular Verbs)

The future tense is pretty self explanatory. It depicts an action that will occur in the, well, future. The vast majority of Spanish learners start out with the ir + a + infinitive to indicate "going to" do something. Notice the following example:

Voy a trabajar mañana. I'm going to work tomorrow.


It's really that simple; however, as you progress in the Spanish speaking world, you will discover that there is an additional tense used to convey future actions. It's really quite easy to implement also. The future tense uses a set of standard suffixes that are affixed to the infinitive of the verb. Whether or not the verb is -ar, -er, or -ir means nothing. Using the verb hablar, let's conjugate it in the future:

hablaré I will talk

hablarás you will talk

hablará he/she/it will talk

hablaremos we will talk

hablaréis you (plural) will talk

hablarán they will talk


Notice that there is a spoken and written accent on the last syllable, which is very crucial not to omit. Other than that stipulation, the endings will not change, which will make it easier for you to learn.

Some notes about the future tense: the future tense is generally NOT employed when we have included a time and date in the sentence. In this case, we will just revert to the present tense in these scenarios. For example, if there is a party this Friday in which I plan to attend, I can say the following:

Este viernes asisto a tu fiesta. This Friday I will attend your party.


¡Sigue estudiando!

Professor Joel

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