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It occurs to me that the following all mean nearly the same thing in English: We are going to eat tomorrow We will eat tomorrow We will be eatin

It occurs to me that the following all mean nearly the same thing in English: We are going to eat tomorrow We will eat tomorrow We will be eating tomorrow We are going to be eating tomorrow There might be others I'm not thinking of right now. Modern English has a lot of extra subtlety. Dutch: We eat tomorrow. Not only is a future tense avoided, and an -ing tense is avoided, and a lot of filler words avoided, but also the present tense is avoided since in Dutch, the infinitive verb itself is the actual present tense about half the time (which cannot really be translated literally here)! Such simplicity doesn't really exist in English. I find Dutch a lot like learning an elegant, dynamically-typed programming language. The -ing stuff is just filler a lot of the time, so the Dutch wisely just don't do that most of the time.

Noos 9y ago
I don't think they are the same thing. "We will" is a stronger statement in intent than "We are going." "We will elect Trump!" versus "We are going to elect Trump!" may refer to the same election, but the former would be followed by a stronger statement: We will elect Trump! It's great! We are going to elect Trump! I'm excited! I don't think it's a hard and fast rule, but if people use the future tense, it's more of a personal or indefinite statement, and the present tense is more universal and definite one. "We elect Trump tomorrow." is something that misses this. You remove the individual ability to affirm or weaken the statement. I don't know much about Dutch and English, but I'd wonder if many Dutch people fluent in English have problems with getting taken too definitely or being seen as pushy.