Future Indicative

Let's switch to the future now. Again, there are various shades of future (I will go, I will have been, I might go, I am going to go etc.), so there are various tenses that relate to the future. The simplest of these tenses is simply known as ‘future’ or ‘future indicative’ which is a fairly logical name really (the grammarians must have been having an ‘off’ day). In English, we achieve this tense by using the auxiliary verb ‘will’, or sometimes ‘shall’ (strictly speaking, in English, you are supposed to use ‘shall’ for the first person, and ‘will’ for the second and third person – unless you are trying to add emphasis, in which case you use them the opposite way round).

In Portuguese, the future tense is not used very often – they tend to use the appropriate conjugation of ‘ir’, followed by the infinitive of the verb (eg. ‘vou comer’ instead of ‘comerei’). You are more likely to come across the future indicative in writing than in speech. The true future indicative is a simple form, and is conjugated as follows:

Irregular verbs and the future indicative…

A helpful hint for remembering the future indicative forms, is that they all start with the full infinitive – not just the stem of it (although not all irregular verbs do so). Be careful though not to confuse the third person plural form of the future indicative with the preterite third person plural, as they both start with the full infinitive.