Overcomplicating Using the Spanish simple future to express probabilities ...

Question

This lesson overcomplicates what should be a pretty straightforward use of the simple future tense. Just look at all the questions on this topic! While all of us know that the future is not fixed or 100% predictable, we still make predictions that sound pretty guaranteed even if they are technically probabilities.
 
The quiz questions complicate this further by giving us examples that are, frankly, poor translations. For example, one quiz question asks us to translate: "With this crisis, the currency could lose value." I would bet serious money that if you gave this sentence to 100 native Spanish professors, at least in Mexico, not a single one of them would ever give the supposedly correct answer: "Con esta crisis la moneda perderá valor." Not a single one of my three Mexican professors, including a DELE examiner, translated "could lose" as "perderá."
 
They all used "podría" for "could," with either "podría perder valor" or "podría depreciarse." Conversely, in reverse translation of the Spanish answer to English, they all 100% translated "perderá valor" as "will lose value", with certainty—not as "could lose value."
 
Maybe Spanish from Spain is different, but that quiz question and translation are not correct in Mexican Spanish. I suggest editing the lesson and quiz questions to remove the "could, might" possibility from translations using the simple future tense—at least in the Latin American Spanish lessons. At best, it's confusing, but more likely, it's just not a good translation.

Inma Sánchez · Answer

Hola JeraldIf you read the lesson again, you'll realize that we talk about different nuances of the future tense. One is the most straight forward usage which is a simple "something will happen" where someone is simply stating an action that will definitely happen in the future. That is the most common usage that you are referring to. If you continue reading, we explain an extra nuance of the use of the simple future where there is a specific scenario in the mind of the speaker; in this case the person, more than declaring that something will happen, they're seeing that action more as a prediction (they predict that that will happen normally based on some circumstances) or a probability more than a certainty, which is normally accompanied by other elements in the sentence that suggest this or even a specific tone when the speaker says it. There's a need to imagine this scenario because it's not explicit. This is the reason why we add a hint in the test-questions with these nuances and the reflection of that goes in the use of "might" "could"... to suggest that case of probability/prediction. All these test-questions have a drop-down menu so you need to choose the one using the tense that conveys that, which is what you learn in the lesson. Most teachers go beyond the most common uses of the tenses and also explain different nuances, despite those being less frequent. It could also be that these particular nuances are not so common in Mexican Spanish, which I will explore and if it's not applicable, then we will of course modify the lesson. I hope this clarified it. Saludos cordiales Inma