Future Simple Tense

Where will you be in 5 years time?

Do you think about your future?
Or do you prefer to live in the present.

Even if you prefer to live in the moment, it is important to think about the future and when we are speaking about the future it is important to know the proper English grammar to use.

In this blog we are going to talk about when to use the Future Simple Tense.

So what do we use it for? As you will see, we can use it for different situations, some very common situations.

What is it’s structure?
The Future Simple is just that, very simple:

will + (infinitive) go/be etc.

We use will to make a decision in the moment!

“Will you marry me?”

Not really, but you get the idea, right?

Lets imagine you live with a few housemates and there are a lot of chores to be done.Your housemate has a house meeting to try to decide who wants to do which job.
The options are:

Clean the living room
Do the washing up
Clean the bathroom
Take out the rubbish

If you like one option you can use the Future Simple and say, for example:

“I’ll do the washing up”

You made a decision in that moment so you used the Future Simple tense.

Another example might be in a restaurant.

You go to a restaurant, sit down and then the waiter or waitress comes to your table. They ask you what you would like to order. If you have already decided, you can say:

“I’ll have the Chicken Caeser Salad, please.”

You have just in that moment decided what to order.

Notice that in both these situations we used a contraction, I’ll. We form this contraction simply by adding ‘ll to the pronoun.

A quick reminder of this can be seen below:

I will                               I’ll

You will                         You’ll

He/She/It will             He’ll/She’ll/ It’ll

We will                           We’ll

You will                          You’ll

They will                       They’ll

Don’t forget, we also need the infinitive without ‘to’!

e.g I’ll help you.

We also use the structure will + infinitive to make a prediction about the future. If we use this structure we are guessing what the future will be.

If your friend tells you the are worried about a situation, you can comfort them by saying something like: “Dont worry! Everything will be ok.”

This is a common thing we say to our friends and people we love to comfort them by predicting that things will be ok.

We can also use this language to say what we think will happen, because, after all, we don’t know what the future holds. We simply use the word think to do this.

For example: Aron –“What do you think about this pandemic?”
Zach – “Well, I think it’ll get better soon.”

In this conversation we see that Zach is predicting what he thinks will happen.

Below you can find some more examples of predictions on what people think life will be like in the year 2030.

“In the year 2030 there will be people on Mars.”

“We will use flying cars by the year 2030.”

“There won’t be any poor people in 2030” (we use won’t for the negative)