Thus, modern Japanese verbs are marked for aspect, not tense. However, these are not used for Japanese they refer explicitly to the grammar (verb forms) of English and other languages that do have tense. In Japanese, the grammatical tenses past, present, and future are known as kakokei, genzaikei, and miraikei 過去形・現在形・未来形. Modern grammarians divide the Japanese verb into ru ル and ta タ aspects, the incomplete and the complete (from the speaker's perspective). It seems that Japanese grammarians agree that the language lacks tense, but has aspect. For some, the debate still rages, but for many others, more sensible ways of looking at the question of verbal time have been developed. I still remember when I was learning Mandarin nearly half a century ago that some teachers and authorities argued vehemently that Chinese "lacks tense", while others declared that "of course Chinese has tense". Furthermore, a language can lack grammatical tense for itself, but still be able to talk about grammatical tense in other languages (here again, Japanese is one such language). The first thing I feel compelled to say is that a language can have a concept of past, present, and future (though I'm not sure that all languages do) without having past, present, and future tense in the language itself (Japanese is one such language). I concluded by saying that I would write a separate post about past, present, and future: here it is. The ensuing discussion was quite animated, touching upon the nuances and implications of words for the future in many different languages. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the future: " Mirai".
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