THE NEW COMER

[laurent]

HELLO  hall forumers , i'm a new comer in the forum , my name is laurent , i'm french in south in french ( nimes).
I have tried speak english since 3 years ago , but it's not easy , this years i haven't to teacher so i'm very happy to descover this blog .
thank you thomas for that .
i'm sorry for the mistakes in my writting 
good evening at the next time in the forum  laurent

[John Doe]

Welcome among us.

[Thomas]

Welcome to the forum laurent! I hope that you enjoy the forum and talk a lot with us

[patard]

A grammar question
I hope that you enjoy the forum and talk a lot with us
You use present . In french we would use a future.
When do you use a present to mean a future?

[Thomas]

That's a really good observation, actually. There are two different situations that I can think of now where English and French are different...

1) My sentence above -- "I hope that you enjoy the forum." Here, we have a theoretical situation. I do not know if laurent will enjoy the forum or not, but I want him to. And because I do not know if it will happen, I use the present tense. If you want to be grammatically correct, this is not the present tense, it is the subjunctive :O Due to spelling, the subjunctive in English is often indistinguishable from the present tense. However, if I rewrote this same sentence in the 3rd person, it would become "I hope that he enjoy the forum".

The thing is, the large, large majority of native speakers of English would tell you that "I hope that he enjoy the forum" is an incorrect sentence. The subjunctive is dying for most uses in the English language, so most native speakers would say "I hope that he enjoys the forum" and think they were correct. And that's why I started this explanation by saying I was using the present tense!

2) General descriptions -- "When I go to Italy, I will speak Italian." Here, you see two sentences. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that in French, one would say "Quand j'irai en Italie, je parlerai italien." So in English and French, we use the future for "speak", but with the verb "go", we see a difference. Why is that? Well, the idea in French is that the "going to Italy" is in the future, so we use the future tense. Easy enough. The idea in English is that with the word "when" in front of "I go to Italy", the phrase "When I go to Italy" is just a description, and time does not matter. Look at this example...

It often rains in Seattle. Il pleut souvent à Seattle.

Both languages, present tense. Why? Because we are describing something. There is not a specific time here, we do not mean in the past, we do not mean in the future, and honestly, we do not mean in the present. We mean "in general", which is one of the uses of the so-called "present tense" (a misleading name in this case). That is why we use the "present tense" for when I go to Italy in English. It's not saying "I will go to Italy", that is a statement specifically about the future. Just saying "When I go to Italy..." is a description that does not have a time attached to it.

Does that help? This is a tricky subject, especially number 2...

[slidertrilogy]

yes welcome in anglais pod even if I now that it`s been a long time that you posted this message.