Today we will be talking about two tenses that are sometimes difficult to imagine using in everyday conversation/writing: the future continuous and the future perfect.
Future Continuous:
Subject + will be + ing
This time next week, I’ll be driving to my parents house
(already in progress at certain time in future)
The future continuous is a great tense! It allows us to talk about many different circumstances and also allows us to ask polite questions about future plans.
Let’s first look at how we use it to ask polite questions about plans:
What time will we be eating dinner this evening?
There are many ways to ask this question, of course, but this is a much politer version of ‘what time is dinner?’
More examples:
Will you be bringing your husband to the end of year party?
Will Sarah be starting university next year?
Will you be driving up to Nara?
We also often use the future continuous to talk about future plans:
This time next week I will be lying on the beach in Hawaii with my family.
By next month you will be speaking English fluently.
We can also use it to talk about predictions/guesses about the future:
I'm pretty sure that Deej will be coming to the meeting later.
I don’t think Mike will be eating with us later.
Or about events that we expect to happen:
I will be seeing Abdul at the conference next week.
When my son goes on his school trip he will be staying with his cousin.
Lastly, we can use still to talk about events that have already started but we expect to continue into the future.
Hopefully our stock prices will still be rising tomorrow.
This is taking so long, at this rate I’ll still be ironing at midnight.
I’ll still be studying English tenses next week.
We usually use the future perfect to talk about a completed action in the future, however there is one more use for the future perfect to talk about the present.
Subject + will have + past participle
The train will have left when you arrive
(will be finished before specified time in the future)
I will have completed this project by this time next week.
Person A: Shall we all eat together at 7?
Person B: But won’t Laura and Tom have already left by 7pm?
Child: Can I watch TV at 6?
Parent: Will you have finished your homework by then?
Person A: Can I call you at 10 this evening?
Person B: I will have probably fallen asleep by then.
We also sometimes use the future perfect to talk about a current situation that we are sure is correct in the present:
She will probably have woken up by now.
I imagine he will have finished his homework already.
As you can see these two tenses are really useful. We hope you are able to incorporate them more often in your everyday English!