Japanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.
There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn.
'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow'
'I go later' vs. 'I will go later'
Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".
I will go
I will be going
I will have gone
I will have been going
Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that:
* The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb
* More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"!
> He would frequently go out for dinner.
Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will".
* English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"
The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German).
Compare the sentence pair:
"Every day at 6, I eat dinner"
"Every day at 6, I will eat dinner"
They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.
Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
Here's what I mean:
1. Go to this link: http://erg.delph-in.net/logon .
2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list.
3. Click "Analyze"
4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line.
5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box.
That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary).
If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb).
If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know.
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By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.
I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages.
There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another.
It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
Obviously, nobody is claiming that Japanese has no way of talking about the future, that's the kind of nonsense non-linguists like to read into purely grammatical differences. It's still a fact that English has a grammatical future (actually more than one), even if it's not inflectional and not strictly required in all situations, and Japanese does not.
For example, "tomorrow, it's cold" would generally sound weird in English, the most common way to express this would be "tomorrow, it's gonna be cold". There's nothing weird about 明日は寒い, by contrast.
To be clear, I completely disagree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis & don't think there's anything "weird" about Japanese, the past / nonpast split as opposed to past / present / future is quite common cross-linguistically[1]. The idea of whether something is grammaticalized is separate than whether a language can express it -- AFAIK the current theory is that all languages express just about the same set of concepts, just certain languages evolve grammaticalizations of tenses, aspects, topic, politeness, etc. and others represent them "ad hoc" via constructs like "do tomorrow" etc. Hopefully that makes sense. I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
[1]: And there are lots of systems, like multiple levels of past remoteness, too: https://wals.info/feature/66A#2/26.7/149.2
These humongous walls of text sound rather like "and therefore I choose to define what English does as 'grammaticalize' and what Japanese does as 'not grammaticalize'".
> I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
Then maybe have another think about why you're coming off as if that's exactly what you're doing.
going = present
gone = preterite
No future tense there.
You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present tense, but it is not the same thing.
«going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite».
They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles.
Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
The fact remains there's no future participles in English.
None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible.
Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense.
Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.
In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).
For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais).
Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.
Muahahahaa, good one!
I'm going to go
I'm going to be going (?)
I'm going to have gone (??)
I'm going to have been going (??)