Future Tense Is Annoying?!

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!

Virtuoso means...

According to my favorite dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, a virtuoso is defined as "someone who is a very skilful performer, especially in music". The reason I saw the word in the dictionary was that I checked a word, vis-a-vis, though.

I'm no complaint about the definition of a virtuoso, but I'm very curious about why the editor (s/he is her fan?) chose the illustration:

"violin virtuoso Vanessa Mae"

I think she is a great talented violinist. However, I do not have an image for her as a virtuoso. One of her performances is below.

What I believe as a virtuoso is Itzhak Perlman. Actually, when checking out the word on the Wikipedia, Perlman is one of the examples. The point I want to make is that my connotation from the term, virtuoso, is a  performer like Perlman. But, if the word reminds other people of like Mae, what's going on is, I think, that a virtuoso may imply like her performance. Although this is a mere example of using a word differently among generations, I feel a big difference between Perlman and Mae. Just in my opinion, Perlman is more an appropriate instance! Please check out a virtuoso in your dictionary!