Let’s talk about the future!
I have written about the future tense before. In my post How to use ‘ich will’ and ‘ich werde’ when talking about the future in German and also in my post How to say New Year’s resolutions in German
Today I show you another easy way to talk about the future in German, and that is by using the present tense with time phrases.
All you need is the present tense (For a reminder, see How to conjugate German verbs in the present tense) and a time phrase.
Here are some time phrases:
- morgen – tomorrow
- morgen früh – tomorrow morning (early)
- morgen Vormittag – tomorrow morning (up to lunchtime)
- morgen Nachmittag – tomorrow afternoon
- morgen Abend – tomorrow evening
- übermorgen – the day after tomorrow
- nächsten Montag – next Monday
- nächsten Monat – next month
- nächste Woche – next week
- nächstes Wochenende – next weekend
- nächstes Jahr – next year
- in zehn Minuten – in 10 minutes’ time
- in einer Stunde – in an hour’s time
- in den nächsten paar Tagen – in the next few days
- in einem Monat – in a month’s time
- bald – soon
- dann – then
- nachher – later
- danach – afterwards
- anschließend – afterwards
- gleich – immediately/ straight away
- sofort – immediately/ straight away
No matter what your present tense says, as soon as you add a time phrase like the ones above, it is obvious that you’re talking about the future.
The video shows you how you could change a present tense sentence, like Ich gehe zum Supermarkt into future tense sentences by adding a time phrase:
- Ich gehe morgen zum Supermarkt.
- Morgen gehe ich zum Supermarkt.
- Ich gehe gleich zum Supermarkt.
- Ich gehe nachher zum Supermarkt.
These phrases and the video have been taken from my online course German tenses 3 – the future tenses where you learn how to use the official German future tenses and find other ways of talking about the future in German. And for a 10% discount use the coupon code BLOGPOST.