Here is an intriguing study by Keith Chen that I found on TED and want to share. The study basically reveals a relationship between linguistic characteristics and savings rates, based on statistical analyses. The researcher focuses on future tense using among languages, and for some languages like Japanese there is no future tense to describe future things, while others such as English use future tense. Instead of using future tense, Japanese language, for instance, uses present tense for future events.
Is this interesting? Yeah, it is for me.
I guess people who have experience to learn different language from the native one would get such feeling too. If so, let's check out the following clip. Find something interesting!
Now my little story is below.
For the first time when learning future tense at an English class, I just couldn't understand the concept because my native language is Japanese (no future tense). I thought when saying something for the future, for instance, I state it rains "tomorrow" using key terms like "tomorrow," so it is not necessary to use "will" or "is going to." I felt English is so annoying... much easier to say just adding "tomorrow", "future", or " later" instead of using future tense. And also, according to the aforementioned research, future tense users are less savings rates, health behaviors, and retirement assets. It seems to me using future tense has no merit?!
At last, one thing I want to mention is there is past tense in Japanese!
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