New Year Resolutions

A common topic of conversation at parties on New Year’s Eve is people’s resolutions, or in other words, what promises people make to themselves at the beginning of the year. For example, they may say ‘This year I’m going to give up smoking’, or ‘I’m going to lose ten kilos before April’, or even ‘I’m going to learn a foreign language’.

Whether they do these things or not is a different matter, very often people have forgotten or ‘given up’ [abandoner] before the end of the month.

What might be more important for you, as a student of English, is the way we express these resolutions
This year I’m going to give up smoking ~ I’m going to lose ten kilos before April ~ I’m going to learn a foreign language.

The way that we use the ‘going to tense’ is, in my opinion, the biggest problem when discussing the future for French learners of English. The reason is that it looks so like ‘je vais faire …’, but they are used differently.

We use ‘going to’ in New Year resolutions because they are plans, they have been decided beforehand [au préalable]. If I have understood the futur proche correctly, it is used when we have just decided to do something, perhaps only moments before, or as we are speaking.

If you would like to know more about why this is so very important, come to La Selve; it is one of the most frequent topics in our lessons.