Future Tense
In the first semester, we told you that you can live happily without the German future tense because it has been replaced by the present tense, often used with adverbs like morgen or später or prepositional phrases like in einer Woche or in einem Jahr.
Er kommt morgen.
Ich mache in einem Jahr mein Staatsexamen.
This information is still true! All the same, there is a future tense in German.
Although the Germans do not use the future very often, it exists and it is used in some situations. Even you may need it, especially it you want to emphasize that you are determined that what you say will really happen in the future! Anyway, you want to be able to recognize it.
The future is formed with the auxiliary werden. You remember that werden was also used to form the passive voice. However, for the passive one uses werden followed by the past participle, whereas in the case of the future one uses werden followed by the infinitive:
Passive sentences would look like:
Die Tür wird geöffnet.
Das Essen wurde bestellt.
Whereas sentences in the future look like this with the infinitive at the end:
Er wird morgen kommen.
Ich werde in einem Jahr mein Examen machen.
Future of einziehen:
ich werde einziehen
du wirst einziehen
er, sie, es wird einziehen
wir werden einziehen
ihr werdet einziehen
sie werden einziehen
These sentences indicate emphatically that you expect this event to happen!
As in English, the future can also express that you assume that something is the case in the present, but you are not 100% sure. In English, we use a progressive form (will be + participle):
Marie will be at home now. She will be fixing dinner.
Stephen King's new book will not be sold out already!
Look at the following sentences:
Dein Vater wird im Büro sein.
Er wird sich (wohl) für die Prüfung vorbereiten.
Sie wird sich noch duschen.
The speaker has chosen to use the future tense form to indicate that he only assumes that in the future it will be known for sure that these actions have taken place.
We also use modals in both languages to express this meaning:
Er muss wohl krank sein. Die Wohnung dürfte ihm gefallen.
He must be sick. That apartment ought to please him.
Obviously, this is a quite sophisticated use of the future and you do not have to integrate it into your active German repertoire.