English General : Grammar - Using “Wish” & “Hope”

Grammar : Using “Wish” and “Hope”

If we want to use "I hope" and "I wish" correctly, we just need to memorize these two phrases :

"I hope I can..."  &  "I wish I could..."

We may be wondering, why do English speakers use the present tense for "hope" and the past tense for "wish" ? The secret is that "could" isn't really past tense. It looks like past tense, but it's secretly something different. It's the "unreal" aspect. In other words, it expresses something that's not really true, or not very likely.

We use "wish" to talk about things that are impossible, or things that probably won't happen :

I wish I could fly.
I wish there were more hours in the day.
I wish I'd studied something a little more practical.

On the other hand, we use "I hope..." when there's a good chance that something might happen. We can use it to say what we want to happen in the future :

I hope this cake turns out OK.

I hope we can still be friends.

The Grammar of "Wish" and "Hope"

Here's how "wish" and "hope" look in present, past, and future :

Present

I hope this is the last mistake.

I wish my phone worked here.

Past

I hope Antonio got home safely.*

I wish you'd told me sooner.

* We can't use "hope" to talk about something in the past, unless we don't know what happened yet. In this example, we haven't heard whether Antonio got home safely.

Future

I hope it stops raining soon.*

I wish it would stop raining.

* We follow "hope" with the present tense of a verb, even when we're talking about the future. So we say "I hope it stops" instead of "I hope it will stop."