English Grammar Rules & Mistakes: Learn All of the Essentials: Writing, Speaking, Literature and Punctuation Rules Complete with 10 Key Skills and Over 200 Common Error Examples

Dreaming of the future: understanding the future tense
Finally, we will take a look at the future tense. Arguably it’s the most
exciting tense, as who doesn’t like dreaming of future plans. This tense is all
about things that have not happened yet but that we want to talk about
anyway. This might be so you can make future plans with your friends or
predict the score of the footie game.
Simple future
By the end of the year, I will learn a new language.
This is an example of the simple future tense that talks of learning a new
language in the future.
The simple future tense is not difficult to conjugate as you either add will
before a root verb or you add am/is/are going to plus the root verb.
First-person singular
I will learn
Second-person singular
You will learn
Third-person singular
He/She/It will learn
First-person plural
We will learn
Second-person plural
You will learn
Third-person plural
They will learn

---

Even though it is easy to conjugate, the simple future can be confusing as you
can have two ways to say the same thing.
First-person singular
I am going to learn
Second-person singular
You are going to learn
Third-person singular
He/She/It is going to
learn
First-person plural
We are going to learn
Second-person plural
You are going to learn
Third-person plural
They are going to learn
As you can see, I will learn and I am going to learn are both in the simple
future tense and both mean the same thing. The difference is that using will is
considered formal and using going to is considered informal.
You will not learn anything if you don’t stop talking over the class.
To make a simple future tense negative that uses will, simply add not after it.
This year will be not be any different, I am not going to learn
French no matter what I promised myself on New Years’ Eve.
To make a simple future tense negative that uses going to, add not before it.
Future perfect
By the time I arrive, he will have left.
The future perfect tense may look like it has been designed to catch you out
but it isn’t as nonsensical as it appears. Okay, yes you do use a past tense
verb to describe something that has not happened yet. However, when you
think about it, there is no other way to describe it. As you can see in this
example, the future perfect tense is for describing something happening in the
future that is dependent upon something else happening first. By the time the
person arrives, which is the first part in a sequence of events, the other person

---