Spanish Grammar
How to Express Future in Spanish
How to express future in Spanish? That is a good question during an election campaign. Politicians love talking about future, promises and plans.
There are many ways to express future in Spanish, as happens with the English language. It depends on the speaker’s intention. We’ll play the role of a politician and we’ll speak about how to express future in Spanish.
Future using “el presente de indicativo”
The present of indicative is a non-marked tense. That means it can be used to talk about the past, the present or the future. With this last usage, it expresses schedules or timetables. It’s very useful to indicate when an event starts, when the means of transportations leave… Let’s see some examples:
– ¿A qué hora empieza el concierto? – Empieza a las ocho. – No sé si podré ir porque el autobús sale a las siete y media. ¡Qué pena!
After this example of how to express future in Spanish, let’s move to the verb “ir”.
How to express future in Spanish with the verb “ir”
The usage of verbal periphrasis is very common in Spanish. The verb ir usually express a movement and, metaphorically, a movement in the time towards the future. Actually, it can mean an intention or a prediction based on an evidence. The construction is ir + a + infinitive. Be careful and don’t use the present progressive to translate literally from English. I’m calling you tonight is not estoy llamándote esta noche! This is how it works:
– Esta noche no voy a estudiar porque tengo que ir a casa de mis padres. Si sigo así, voy a suspender mi examen DELE.
The future tenses
You can wonder how to express future in Spanish using a proper future tense. Of course, we have a specific future tense. We could say that it’s more used to express predictions, promises or instant decisions, but in practice, we use it for the same situations we’ve seen before. This is its form:
Now, take a look at this example:
– Cuando sea mayor seré médico. Te prometo que estudiaré mucho para conseguirlo.
How to express future in Spanish with the present subjunctive
All the previous forms were in the indicative mode. Can we use the subjunctive to express future? Of course, mainly with the present subjunctive, but also with the imperfect subjunctive. They are used for speculations, probabilities, wishes and intentions in the future (also in conditional clauses).
Let’s see them:
– Si mañana lloviera, me quedaría todo el día en casa. Es posible que llame a algunos amigos para que vengan a casa. Me gustaría que se divirtieran conmigo.
As you can see, we have many options to choose how to express future in Spanish. Just think in your future and reserve lessons on SpanishviaSkype. It’s easy and convenient.
