Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/

Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage. There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn. 'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow' 'I go later' vs. 'I will go later' Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".