"I will finish/have finished cooking by the time you come home" Dear italki users! As far as I know, we should use Future Perfect in such sentences as: 1. I will have finished cooking by the time yo

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Sergey

"I will finish/have finished cooking by the time you come home" Dear italki users! As far as I know, we should use Future Perfect in such sentences as: 1. I will have finished cooking by the time you come home 2. I will have read the book by Monday 3. Next week, I will have lived here for 20 years (I'm not sure if this one is correct, though) I wonder what would happen if we used Future Simple here instead: 1a. I will finish cooking by the time you come home 2a. I will read the book by Monday 3a. Next week, I will live here for 20 years. Are those three sentences just grammatically incorrect or they are possible but have slightly different meaning?

Feb 7, 2020 3:24 AM

Answers · 9

1a and 2a are OK, but not great. A native might say them, but probably wouldn't write them. 3a is WRONG. If you use "for" or "since" to talk about duration, you HAVE TO use a perfect tense. It sounds very strange if you don't. EDIT: After further consideration, you COULD say something like "Tomorrow, I will sing for 20 minutes". There, the entire 20 minutes occur within "tomorrow". Similarly, you can do similar things with other tenses "I swim for 20 minutes every day" "When I was young, I went hiking for two days every week" "I went hiking for a month in 2015". However, "20 years" is longer than "next week", so this interpretation wouldn't make sense, so 3a is simply wrong.

February 7, 2020

I mostly agree. 3a is definitely wrong. 1a is ok, but 1 sounds better. 2a is perfectly correct if you haven't started reading the book yet. If you have already started reading the book, 2 is better.

February 7, 2020

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