Ways of talking about the future
THOSE people who learn Spanish in a grammatical, mechanical kind of way, tend to learn the ‘future simple tense’ (more of which later) and then think they have talking about the future all sewn up and sorted out. If only it were that easy!
Of course, the ‘future simple tense’ is a useful tool to have in our linguistic toolbox, but it is not always the most accurate one.
To put it another way, it would be like someone speaking English like this: ‘Tomorrow I will go to Murcia and I will have some lunch. Then I will go for a walk. In the evening I will watch Coronation Street’. It gets the message across, but it does sound rather wooden!
So, there are various ways of talking about the future, and this is what we are going to explore for the next few articles.
Way back at the beginning of this whole series I introduced a construction that is probably the most useful one to use to discuss our future plans. I call this the ‘future of intention’ and it simply consists of the verb ‘ir’ in the present tense, followed by ‘a’ followed by the infinitive of another verb.
So, in the first person this is ‘voy a’ (translated as I’m going to’); ‘Voy a comer’ (I’m going to eat, or I’m going to have lunch’); ‘Voy a estudiar español’ (I’m going to study Spanish). These are our plans and intentions.
If we change ‘voy’ to the second person ‘vas’ we can ask about other people’s plans and intentions. ‘¿Qué vas a hacer?’ (What are you going to do?). This is a tricky one to pick up when spoken as it will sound like this: ‘Kevasathair’.
Actually, it’s even worse if it’s said to you in the (usted) polite form ¿Qué va a hacer?’This sounds like ‘Kevathair’. When it’s said with an Andalucian or South American accent (amongst others) when the ‘th’ sound becomes a ‘s’ sound.
As South Americans more often use the ‘usted’ form, that gives us ‘Kevasair’. However, the way I have represented the sound of the final ‘er’ as ‘air’ is not really accurate, it’s just the nearest English written equivalent.It’s a shorter Spanish ‘e’ sound with the light ‘r’ at the end. Perhaps ‘Kevasé’ is a closer representation of the real sound.
Sorry, I didn’t set out to frighten you with this article, but it looks as though that’s what I might be doing. Almost everybody I speak to about learning Spanish tells me that understanding what they hear is by far the most difficult thing, and it’s really because of these kinds of problems.
You might read ‘¿Qué va a hacer?’, understand it in its written form and even say it to considerable success, but are you prepared to answer something that sounds more or less like ‘Kevasé’.
Well anyway, I’ll leave you to think about that one, and get back to ‘talking about the future’ next week!