"I will," "I can," "I will (probably)" A fundamental problem with 會

Question

I've always been a little wary of talking about the future in Chinese using the character 會, my early teachers made it ambiguous or demanded that I use a 的 at the end of every 會 sentence, but then other times I don't hear them use it. I've gotten a lot of mixed signals. Normally I add on the future time or say 要 instead whenever possible. Even though no one has told me I'm wrong when I use it, I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I use 會 to talk about the future.

However, today I went back into my more basic textbook and started making flashcards, but this time I decided all the definitions would come directly from a Chinese dictionary. The English translation for the context of 會 that I was searching for in this case was "will". The related definitions were as follows:

(副詞)

１能、能夠。如：「我會游泳」、「只要努力，理想一定會實現。」

２可能。多用於疑問語氣。如：「他會來嗎？」、「會不會是他回來了？」

There was no certainty of the future at all. Does it really just mean "能" or "可能"？

If I'm not mislead, I think this revealed a reality about Chinese thinking to me. No one actually knows if something will happen. We can only say that it's possible that it will happen. "Will" is so definite, confident, it's 100% sure. Either that or this is a bad dictionary.

So my questions are these:

1. Can 會 directly be used to mean "will"? (As a 副詞)

2. If 會 does mean "will" could "我會游泳" potentially mean both "I will swim." and "I can swim." depending on the context? (Of course, if so, there are ways to convey the meaning less ambiguously, but I want to use this question to find out if I am using the word correctly.)

3. If 會 doesn't mean "will" how do I say with the confidence of English that something shall occur in the future (using natural sounding conversational Chinese)?

Answer 1

1. yes, fx, 他会来吗？是的，他会来。
2. yes,it depends on the context.
3. we use extra word to express the confidence, fx.'一定'，‘必然’。

Answer 2

You have encountered a fundamental, and very complex, problem for English and Chinese speakers who are trying to understand each other. Two things to remember here.

First, English 'will' is a very complicated word, with many shades of meaning, which usually go under the linguistic label of "modality". Compare "Will you shut up?" "I'll save you, Nell!" "It will be a cold day in hell when this Ghul rises again." etc. Chinese of course has no one way of expressing all these different meanings. It just doesn't pack all these meanings into a single vocabulary item.

Second, Chinese is a tenseless language. Many people object to this claim, but it is so. Let's take your example "I will swim tomorrow." On the English side, note that this is not in the same category of events as "The sun will rise tomorrow" in terms of certainty. Chinese as a language requires you to take account of things like this. So you need to have something more in mind here.

Let's say, for example, that you are too busy to go swimming today, so you tell your friend "I will swim tomorrow." One way to say this (I believe) is simply 我明天才去游泳, which I think emphasizes your intention to do something more important today, or perhaps 我明天再去游泳, which, maybe, indicates that you think it is already too late to swim today. The point is that neither of these uses ANY modal verb. This is impossible in English, because English really does need a tense.

One could say that the Chinese sentences do not indicate certainty, but does the English here? To me, no. Not like "The sun will rise tomorrow." It indicates your plan to do something in the future, which is always a (relatively) uncertain thing.

Answer 3

Just a little tidbit here. Spanish has no more of a future tense than English. The conjugated "modal" auxiliary "haber" is simply tagged onto the end of the infinitive to form the future. Historically, "hé de hablar" became "hablar hé" became "hablaré". In fact, in modern Portuguese, a close cousin to Spanish, a pronoun can be inserted between the infinitive and the future marker "falá-lo-ei".