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Re:MDN converted to Markdown by iopq on Sunday November 06, 2022 @01:21AM (#33489328)
"By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time

"If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident.

By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing)

Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Re:MDN converted to Markdown by klodolph on Sunday November 06, 2022 @01:48AM (#33489539)
> "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence?

By next month, I will have run 50km. This means that "I run 50km" completes first, and then next month arrives afterwards.

> By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4

Depends on how you count tenses. Different textbooks will give different counts, depending on what is considered a "tense". Which is not a reflection of the complexity of English, but a reflection of how hard it is to come up with definitions for terms in linguistics. "Would" is often not counted as a tense, but it may be counted as a tense, particularly if you are explaining English to speakers of a language which have a tense expressing something similar.

> Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated

Most languages are far from simple, I don't think English deserves special attention.