EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 40 Future Tense 235 / 600
Another frequent use of the future tense is expressing things that will be done at
unspecified time, e.g. when the following time adverbs are used:
jednog dana one day
jednom once
kasnije
poslije
later
(The adverb poslije is a bit colloquial, when used on its own; the ending -ije in it is
usually pronounced as one syllable.) For example:
Reći ću ti DL kasnije. I’ll tell you later.
2
Here the verb reći (...) is a perfective verb meaning say, tell. Perfective verbs are
common in the future tense, if you want to accomplish something:
Sutra ću kupiti knjige A . I’ll buy the books tomorrow.
But if you want to engage in an activity, and don’t focus on any particular
accomplishment, you should use an imperfective verb:
Sutra ću kupovati knjige A . I’ll be buying books tomorrow.
Now, something unexpected. There’s a very special verb, although it has completely
regular forms. It’s an alternative to the verb biti (je² +) be. It has only present forms,
and its pres-3 is:
(bude) be (potential, ‘subjunctive’)
It’s impossible to translate it to English out of context; it’s often translated with get,
become, etc. and it’s (in the Standard Croatian) mostly used in some special
constructions (don’t worry, we’ll learn them soon). The verb (bude) is kind of
perfective; however, it’s not normally used in past or future tense, unlike other
perfective verbs, but it can be used in the present tense when we talk about things
that happen any time:
Često bude hladno ujutro. It’s often cold in the morning. (or It often gets cold...)
Therefore, Croatian has two forms of the present tense of verb biti: the irregular je²
standing for real states and events, and the regular bude used only in special cases
where it stands for potential, possible or desired states.®
Using this special verb, we can simply replace the forms of auxiliary je² in the past
tense with the forms of bude and create another tense – the potential future tense:
past tense
potential future
sam², si², je²...
+ past form
budem, budeš, bude...
+ past form
In the Standard Croatian, you cannot simply use the potential future tense or the
verb (bude): it can be used only in specific constructions.