Spanish Future Tense

The easiest tense to conjugate in Spanish is the future. Why, you might ask, have I waited until now to introduce it to you? Because you really don’t need it. You can communicate 90% of what you want to say with the tenses that you already have.

What do I mean? There are three ways in which you can use the present tense to express future actions.

Comemos en un minuto. We’ll eat in a minute.

You should now be quite comfortable with the first way of expressing the future, but you may not have realized that you could express the future in the third way. When you say something like, “Te llamo en una hora,” you are expressing the certainty of the future action. It’s almost as if you’ve already called that person—that’s how certain you are it will happen. The action must occur soon: not in a few days, not in a week, but today or tomorrow.

Usually, you will use the future tense when you want to express what will happen. You may want to say what will happen if someone doesn’t do what they’re told, how long you will be somewhere, or when you’ll come back from your trip.

The future tense expresses more certainty than the first and second methods above. For example, compare the following sentences:

I am going to go to Mexico next summer.
I plan to go to Mexico next summer.
I will go to Mexico next summer.

The third sentence (in the future tense) expresses the highest degree of certainty that the action will occur.

To put a verb into the future tense, ALL you have to do is take the infinitive form of the verb and tack on one of the following verb endings!

-é -ás -á -emos -éis -án

Let’s take a look.	-AR verbs CAMINAR to walk	-ER verbs CORRER to run	-IR verbs SUBIR to go up, ascend
Yo	caminaré	correré	subiré
Tú	caminarás	correrás	subirás
Ud., él, ella,	caminará	correrá	subirá
nosotros/as	caminaremos	correremos	subiremos
vosotros/as	caminaréis	correréis	subiréis
Uds., ellos, ellas	caminarán	correrán	subirán

The future tense isn’t completely regular, but its irregular verbs are few. You learn more about the irregular verbs in the future tense in the next chapter. For now, look at some examples of the future tense in action.

Por ejemplo:

In the next section we'll talk about the Irregular Spanish Future Tense and Nothing (Indefinite Words)

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