Submitted by Andrew (not verified) on Tue, 04/07/2009 - 12:58.
Wow! Lots of confusion here - even among English mother tongue speakers. After 5 years of trying to make it easy for French people to understand English I take the stance that the choice of future tense is not as rigid as say deciding whether to use Past Simple/Present Perfect (although the Americans have thrown the rulebook on that one out of the window) or Present Simple/Present Continuous.
HOWEVER, although English speakers will understand you if you choose the wrong future tense, it is a case of levels of certainty, and the uses OVERLAP.
Level 1 - Future Simple - I (or any other subject)'ve just this minute decided something - even if I now have the intention..... or prediction by intuition.
Level 2 - Future "going to" - It's already been decided and I'm telling you about it... or prediction with external evidence.
Level 3 - Present Continuous - It's 95% going to happen at a fixed time in the future.
The example I use is HOLIDAYS - just decided, "I've got it! I'll go to Egypt!" intention to "I'm going to travel to Egypt", or got the ticket and the reservation "I'm travelling to Egypt next month"....
Wow! Lots of confusion here - even among English mother tongue speakers. After 5 years of trying to make it easy for French people to understand English I take the stance that the choice of future tense is not as rigid as say deciding whether to use Past Simple/Present Perfect (although the Americans have thrown the rulebook on that one out of the window) or Present Simple/Present Continuous.
HOWEVER, although English speakers will understand you if you choose the wrong future tense, it is a case of levels of certainty, and the uses OVERLAP.
Level 1 - Future Simple - I (or any other subject)'ve just this minute decided something - even if I now have the intention..... or prediction by intuition.
Level 2 - Future "going to" - It's already been decided and I'm telling you about it... or prediction with external evidence.
Level 3 - Present Continuous - It's 95% going to happen at a fixed time in the future.
The example I use is HOLIDAYS - just decided, "I've got it! I'll go to Egypt!" intention to "I'm going to travel to Egypt", or got the ticket and the reservation "I'm travelling to Egypt next month"....
Hope this is of help...
Andrew